Breaking Stasis
by Tallulah99
Summary: Grissom and Sara work a murder case together. Case file with some good old GSR.
1. Chapter 1

**Disclaimer:** Wish I owned them...don't.

**Breaking Stasis**

By Tallulah

**Chapter 1**

The night shift of the Las Vegas Crime Lab straggled into the break room one by one, nodding or mumbling a greeting to each other, not quite awake enough this early into their day to indulge in actual conversation. The first stop was always the coffee pot where each immediately brightened on discovering that Lab tech turned newbie CSI Greg Sanders, a coffee aficionado, had been the one to start it.

Gil Grissom, the night shift supervisor, entered shortly, wide awake and raring to go, greeting his assembled crew with little fanfare.

"Sara, you're with me. We've got a 419 down at NorGen labs."

"We're fine, Grissom. And how are _you_?" Greg replied with a pleasant smirk, earning himself a quelling look from his boss and several sets of rolled eyes from his fellow CSIs who simply knew better than to antagonize Grissom this early into the shift.

"Glad you're doing so well tonight Greg," Grissom said. "You've got yourself a possible drug distributor. Be prepared to go dumpster diving." He handed the assignment slip to his young protégé who bounced out of his seat like a jack-in-the-box.

"Solo? Sweet!" Greg crowed, snatching the slip from Grissom's outstretched hand and practically skipping out the door, presumably to thwart any idea Grissom might have entertained of changing his mind.

"That clearly did not have the intended effect," Grissom commented mildly as he watched the young man bop down the hall.

Lanky Warrick Brown unfolded himself from behind the table and chucked the remains of the apple he had been eating into the trashcan behind him. "That's Greg for you. As long as you don't banish him back to the lab, he'll take any trick roll or smash and grab you throw at him and say 'please sir, may I have another.'"

"Well, I'm glad someone in this lab has an affinity for the mundane." Grissom held up two slips; "I've got a trick roll at the Bellagio or a B&E in Fairdale." He glanced between Warrick and Nick Stokes. "You guys wanna flip a coin?"

The trick roll was a Las Vegas oldie, but goodie – a classic con in which one of the 'working girls' from the strip lured her John into a hotel room where her partner waited to rob him. The B&E could be anything from neighborhood kids causing trouble to a druggie hell bent on finding the cash to score a fix. Neither option was particularly appealing to the seasoned investigators, but the choice between spending the night in the cool air conditioned depths of the Bellagio and skulking around the bushes in suburbia was an easy one.

Nick gave a lazy smile from where he lounged against the back wall nursing his second cup of coffee of the night. "I'll arm wrestle you for it."

Warrick quirked an amused eyebrow at his coworker. The two were notorious for engaging in a little friendly competition from time to time; it lightened up the somber nature of their work as well as kept their minds sharp and on top of their game.

"No way man," He replied congenially. "I'd just end up hurting you and then I'd have to do them both myself." He shook his head. "I ain't got time for that tonight."

"Come on player," the well-built Texan taunted good naturedly. He elbowed up to the table flexing a fist. "Put your muscle where your mouth is."

Warrick opened his mouth to reply in kind, but before he managed a sound, Sara, who had been standing impatiently by the doorway since Grissom had announced their 419, leaned over the table without a word, plucked the two assignment slips from Grissom's hand, shuffled them quickly without looking at them and handed one to each of her coworkers.

"Have fun boys," she said with a deceptively sweet, gap-toothed smile. She twiddled her fingers at them in a little wave, turned and left.

The three men stood looking at each other in wry silence for a moment.

Warrick laughed finally. "Man, that girl has _got_ to learn some patience.

"You must first have a lot of patience to learn to have a lot of patience," Grissom quoted. At the blank looks he received from his two CSIs he continued, "Stanislaw J. Lec, Unkempt Thoughts."

"Well of course it is," Nick said, sharing an amused glance with Warrick. Their boss held a reputation for being able to pull a quote out of the air to fit any situation. Occasionally he even used one from a recognizable source. Not often, but occasionally.

Nick stood up and stretched. "You gentleman will have to excuse me." He glanced down at the slip in his hand. "It would appear that I have a B&E in Fairdale to attend to." He looked pointedly back up at Grissom. "You'd best go too before your ride leaves without you."

"I'm not too worried about it Nicky," He said, giving his best enigmatic 'Grissom' smile. He jangled a set of keys over his shoulder as he left the room. "She forgot her keys."

The ride across town was largely a silent one. Grissom had relinquished Sara's keys back into her possession and she hummed occasionally as she drove, but neither felt the urge to fill the peace with needless chatter. There would be plenty to talk about when they arrived at the scene. Relaxing in the passenger seat, Grissom indulged himself in a favorite pastime and watched her covertly as she navigated through light traffic.

If he tried to be critical; she was too pale and too thin, a long legacy of working nights and sleeping days and concentrating so intently on her work that she regularly forgot to eat. He had no claim though, no right to worry about her well-being as anything more than a reflection of her ability to do her job – a purely professional interest. He once again forced himself to tamp down any tender concern that welled to the surface, threatening to spill over into the personal and cross a line that he considered sacrosanct. He was her _boss,_ a teacher and a mentor. It would be unprofessional, and if he was being completely honest with himself, downright unethical of him to take advantage of any affection she had developed for him in his position of authority over her…regardless of how much her very being warmed and enticed the long sheltered area of his heart that longed for the companionship and equality of nature with which she tempted him.

Lost in familiar ruminations, Grissom didn't realize they had arrived at their destination until Sara prodded him gently in the shoulder having apparently already called his name several times to no avail.

"There you are," she said, lips quirked into a one-sided smile. "I was beginning to think I was going to have to call Brass over here to drag you out."

Showing no sign of where his thoughts had taken him, Grissom said nothing and climbed out of the SUV to greet the staid detective as he crossed the darkened parking lot.

"Gil. Sara." Detective Jim Brass acknowledged them each with a nod. Sara tossed him a wave from the rear of the Tahoe where she was unloading their crime scene kits.

Grissom greeted his friend perfunctorily before getting promptly down to business.

"What have we got?" He took the case Sara proffered, trying hard not to notice as their fingers brushed during the exchange, and started towards the building beside Brass with Sara bringing up the rear.

"NorGen labs," the detective began as the trio jogged up the front steps into the imposing edifice, "Is a privately owned research laboratory that subsists on government and private sector grants to keep them in Bunsen burners and test tubes. They're supposedly one of the foremost labs in the country to specialize in predictive gene testing." He paused and glanced over at Grissom. "Go ahead and tell me what that is Gil. You know you want to."

Striking the tone of a well versed lecturer, Grissom needed no further encouragement, but primarily addressed his commentary to Sara. "There are a handful of diseases that can already be predicted with some degree of accuracy based on existing genetic tests, but for the most part the discipline is still in its infancy. Labs across the world are competing with each other to develop new tests that will identify gene abnormalities with more precision. If they can come up with sensitive enough predictors, doctors will be able to determine in advance if a person is susceptible to certain diseases and disorders. Ultimately these tests should revolutionize preventative medicine. They'll be able to monitor patients who exhibit positive predictors and treat them in early stages of any disease – one of the leading factors in whether a patient recovers or not." Grissom added. "Also the lab that 'wins' the race can count on more grant money than they'll know how to spend."

Sara looked impressed while Brass merely responded with a "Hm." and then went on with the case details. "Our DB is Dr. Jonathan Morris. He's a research fellow on staff with the lab. Been with the outfit for 18 years, nearly since its inception."

They crossed the marble foyer whose function in life was clearly not to make visitors feel invited and welcome. It was a wide open space, empty of furniture, nearly as cool and sterile as the clean room where the late Dr. Morris had met his lamentable end. The only decoration of any kind to break up the muted grey monotony was a semi-circle shaped receptionist's desk, unmanned by an actual receptionist at this hour, but currently buzzing with the combined activity of the police unit, lab personnel – stand outs in their white lab coats – and a mildly shell shocked looking gentleman in street clothes who Grissom pegged as likely being someone in charge called in from home to deal with the current crisis.

His assumption proved correct as they approached and Brass made the requisite introductions. "Dr. Norfield, this is Gil Grissom and Sara Sidle. They're with the crime lab." He turned back to Grissom. "Dr. Norfield here runs the lab."

The frazzled man stuck his hand out awkwardly, obviously unsure as to what etiquette was called for under the circumstances.

"Brent. Brent Norfield," he said as he shook Grissom's hand. "I'm the director here."

The scientist appeared to be in his mid- to late- 50s with wispy graying hair. He was tall and thin so as to be stork-like and lacked only the pocket protector to score the centerfold in 'Science Geek Today.'

"Please let me know if there is anything I can do to help." He was patently distraught and Sara found herself having to stifle the urge to pat him on the shoulder reassuringly.

She had questions beginning to form about the nature of the case and was antsy to get up to the lab and see the body, but held her impatience in check for the time being. Grissom was lead on this and she knew would not appreciate being hurried along, nor would it even have been possible had she tried. She enjoyed watching him work anyway. He had been her mentor for many years and her actual teacher for a brief time prior to that, yet she still felt that she learned something new from him every time they worked together.

She resisted the compulsion to dwell on how frequently they had been working together as of late or to tie any special significance to it. Rather than turning it into something more than it likely was, she merely chalked it up to the fact that they were shorthanded. Their other night shift co-worker, Catherine Willows, was taking a long talked about and much needed two week vacation to spend some quality 'girl time' with her fourteen year old daughter. The fluttery feeling she got in her stomach every time he chose to work with her on a case was quickly suppressed and ignored. She couldn't afford to get her hopes up where her inscrutable boss was concerned.

Sara knew from her own painful experience that he reciprocated her tentative feelings at least to some degree. Hearing him turn the tables in an interrogation room and confess to the suspect that he had feelings for a younger co-worker that he couldn't act on had been a defining moment for Sara. She didn't know his exact reasons; he was her boss, he was older, there was just so much baggage and so many possibilities, but she had seen a choice. She could let it get to her and let every moment she spent around him be psychological torture – the pinings of unrequited, or at least unresponsive love – or she could put it aside and work around or through it, getting the job done and enjoying the simple pleasure of his company and brilliant mind when he allowed it. She had done the latter and for the most part was happy with her decision. This was possibly not the healthiest of lifestyle choices and she was sure her PEAP counselor would use words like 'denial' and 'co-dependence', but her choices were limited. He didn't want her enough and she couldn't not want him. So here they were…in stasis.

Dr. Norfield managed to put himself together sufficiently to answer a few routine questions about the lab itself as well as their standard operation policies. He assured the investigators that any person entering the labs would have to use a keycard to gain access so, at least at the outset, it seemed that they were looking at someone internal to the lab.

"So how many possible entrances are we talking about doc?" Brass queried.

"Five total," the doctor replied, finding his stride and looking more confident speaking on a subject with which he was comfortable. "There's the one through here, of course." He indicated the frosted glass double doors behind them. "Two in the back, and one on each side. They are all key card access with video surveillance monitoring." He looked at Brass eagerly. "I can get you the tapes."

"You do that," Brass said, "in the meantime, me and my friends here are going to head up to the lab and take a look at your crime scene."

Norfield's face fell at the reminder. "I just don't understand this. Who would want to hurt Jonathan?" He shook his head, making the flyaway hairs on his head sway in the slight breeze. "He had an incredible mind and was an asset to the lab. We wouldn't be where we are without him."

"And where is that exactly?" Grissom inquired.

The doctor's chest puffed unconsciously, "We are one of the most highly rated genetics labs in the country. We are verifying predictors on an almost monthly basis now while the rest of the industry is lucky to confirm five or six a year. The government recently renewed our research grant for another three years and that isn't to mention the number of special projects we have undertaken for the private sector." The tired man heaved a sigh, visibly drooping. "Most of those accomplishments can be traced straight back to Jonathan in some way or another. His work was groundbreaking in the field. His team was making strides at an unbelievable rate." He addressed Grissom. "Please find out who did this to him. Jonathan was an amazing scientist and…and well he was a friend." With that, he turned away and then stopped as though something had occurred to him. "Does his wife know yet about...about what happened?" Grissom looked at Brass who was shaking his head.

"No, we haven't contacted her yet. I'll go talk to her myself after I get you guys started upstairs." He turned back to Dr. Norfield. "Doctor, if you could get those tapes to one of these officers here, he'll be sure to get them to me. You've been a lot of help. We appreciate it."

The doctor nodded sadly in acknowledgement and said to no one in particular as he walked away. "Poor Jen…poor kids."

The criminalists climbed the stairs behind Brass to the third floor where the facilities clean rooms were located.

"Apparently, it isn't so unusual for our vic to stay this late if he was in the middle of a cycle. A couple of his coworkers who were also here tonight indicated that he would often stay after hours to take care of paperwork or catching up on his reading."

"He couldn't do that at home?" Sara asked thinking of 'Jen and the kids'.

"Don't know," Brass replied, huffing a little as they reached the third floor landing. The officer at the door swiped a card and nodded them through into the glaring white of the hallway that connected the clean room labs. "The gist I got from what little I know, is that home life wasn't conducive to scientific study." He shrugged. "Make of that what you will."

"I'd rather make of it what it is," Grissom said placidly, walking past the detective and stopping outside what was obviously their crime scene. Both doors to the clean room stood open to the elements and David Phillips from the county coroner's office knelt next to the body. The man lay crumpled on the floor face down, a sizeable pool of blood around his mid-section stood out in stark contrast against the unending white and grey of the lab.

"Not much of a clean room anymore is it?" Sara asked rhetorically.

"Not so much, no." David looked up at her from his position on the floor, nose scrunched to keep his glasses from sliding off.

"Tell us about our guy David." Grissom prompted.

"Yeah, sure." The young coroner sat back, getting into his groove. "We have a 46 year old white male positively identified as Dr. Jonathan Morris." He handed a clip on id badge to Sara bearing the victim's name and id number as well as a photo.

He had been an attractive man, dark hair gone becomingly grey at the temples, slight smile on his face, eyes slightly off center as though he had been looking at something other than the camera when the picture was taken. She turned the badge over, surprised to find a worn sticker affixed to the back – a fuzzy novelty sticker. It was a smiling teddy bear with its arms wide open and the caption 'I love you this much!' printed across the bottom. The edges were starting to disintegrate and the once white background was a smudgy beige. It had obviously been stuck to the badge for a while.

David continued. "Liver temp shows he's been dead about two hours. I haven't turned him over yet, but it looks like at least a .38 caliber gun shot wound." He indicated a sizable hole in the back of the doctor's white coat, rimmed in red.

"Exit wound," Sara said.

David nodded. "I didn't see any shells. If you guys want to go ahead and get your pictures, I'll turn him over when you're done."

Nodding wordlessly, Sara snapped on her latex gloves and entered the room with the camera from her kit. She began taking pictures of the body; careful to take several shots from a multitude of angles to be sure nothing was missed. Once the body was moved, any information they might have gleaned from its positioning was lost without this valuable photo evidence.

"Did anyone report hearing the shot?" Grissom asked; watching Sara as she revolved around the body, the periodic flash from her camera the only indication that the new digital was actually taking pictures.

"Nope," Brass replied from his self appointed post just outside the door. "The place isn't soundproof, but there is a lot of noise dampening in the labs so the sound wouldn't have carried very far. No one else admits to being in any of the clean rooms so aside from our vic and the perp, no one else was on this floor. It was a very elite party"

"Hmm." Grissom replied vaguely and pulled his own gloves on.

As Sara took pictures, He began a slow sweep of the room, carefully hugging the edges to be sure no possible footprints were disturbed. There were none obvious to the naked eye, but it was still possible that they might pick up something meaningful electrostatically. His analytical eye ran over all of the equipment lining the shelves. On first look, nothing appeared to be out of place or unusual, but there was never any telling what might end up being important.

"Okay," Sara said, lowering her camera. "I got it. You can turn him over now."

The face down positioning of the body had hidden the severity of the wound. Face up the gore was evident. Traces of a grayish powder around the hole in the doctor's coat caught Sara's attention. "GSR." She glanced up at Grissom, indicating her find. "Close range then."

Grissom nodded, pursing his lips thoughtfully. "Hard to sneak up on someone in the clean room anyway." He indicated the double doors, both controlled by magnetic locks. It would obviously have been difficult for anyone to have entered the inner chamber without attracting the attention of the person inside. "He knew the perp was in the room with him."

Sara raised her camera again and snapped off some more shots of the body in its new position.

"It doesn't look like he had much warning. No defensive wounds." She said, noting the absence of injuries to the arms or hands. Often, even in a shooting, the victim would have a chance to throw up an arm or hand which wouldn't often stop or much impede the trajectory of the bullet, but it could be an indication of whether or not the person saw it coming.

"No," Grissom agreed, "There wouldn't be". He indicated a tray of vials that lay scattered and smashed where the body had lain on top of them. "The perp came up on him in the middle of an experiment. His hands were full." He gave Sara a thoughtful look. "He either didn't have time to react or was unwilling even subconsciously to lose his data."

They crouched over the body, examining it closely as they went, looking for anything – hair, fibers, trace elements – anything at all that might be out of the ordinary on the doctor's clothing or person.

"At least if we _do_ find something we can be reasonably sure it's related." Sara commented after several minutes of silence and no appreciable results. Grissom cocked an eyebrow at her. "What?" She challenged. "It _is_ a clean room. Isn't that the point? Nothing allowed in that could contaminate the experiments?"

"I don't think we can quite depend on that assumption Sara." Grissom was mildly disapproving.

"I didn't say we should base our investigation on the assumption, Grissom." She groused with a frown. "I said 'reasonably sure' not 'hey we solved the case because there was a piece of lint on the vic's jacket." She gave a mental eye roll. For all that she admired him, the man could be unreasonably frustrating sometimes.

Ultimately there wasn't much worth finding aside from a single strand of hair which, aside from being much too long to have come from the victim, was also a chestnut color – not a match to the vic's salt and pepper. Sara retrieved it from the collar of his lab coat and carefully bindled and recorded it before storing it in her kit, pleased to see that it did include a skin tag – necessary if they were going to be able to make a DNA match.

Grissom sat back on his heels and motioned the young coroner back into the room. "Okay David, you can take him out of here."

Brass stuck his head back in the room as David's team loaded the body onto the gurney for transport to the crime lab morgue. "I'm gonna let you guys work your magic while I go talk to our widow. I'll catch back up with you at the lab."

Grissom nodded and Brass withdrew.

Sara stood, surveying the room. Now that the body was gone and the two CSIs were on their own, they could begin processing the scene itself. "Not much room here to work. How do you want to do this?"

"Go ahead and take the room," Grissom replied, still kneeling next to his kit as he meticulously repacked his supplies. "I'm going to head back to the lobby and see if we have any possilbles for a match to the hair. I'll see if we can get volunteered DNA samples from the remaining staff."

He pushed to his feet then, overbalancing slightly which caused him to lurch forward and lose his balance. He stuck out a hand to catch himself on the first thing that presented itself: Sara's denim-covered leg. Horrified, he snatched his hand back like he'd been burned.

"S...sorry. I..uh… Sorry." He stammered apologetically.

"No problem." Sara replied automatically, resisting the urge to press her hand over the spot on her thigh where he had touched her, inadvertent though it may have been.

She turned away, anxious to relieve the tension that suddenly seemed to permeate the room. "So I should get started in here." She surveyed the lab with a clinical eye, trying to determine where best to start processing.

"Right," Grissom replied, grateful for the redirection.

"I'll go ahead and dust for prints, but I kinda doubt we'll find any in here. Everybody that works here wears these." She snapped the edge of her gloves in illustration and indicated a supply shelf stocked full of all varieties of protective coverings.

"Dust anyway," Grissom said. "Maybe we'll luck out. It is a clean room after all. If you find _any_ prints…" A slow smile spread across his whiskered face. "We can be reasonably sure they're related." He turned then and left.

Sara stared at the doorway he had just vacated with a bemused expression, shook her head once and returned to her work.

-------------------------------

Back in the lobby, Grissom petitioned for and was granted permission by each of the lab's personnel to obtain a DNA sample. He walked down the assembled line swabbing the inside of each person's cheek before snapping the swab back into its protective case and writing the name onto the affixed label.

There were only eighteen lab employees present at the moment. A nineteenth, Richard Greenway, showed up on the log as having used his card to enter the building within the last two hours, making him as viable a suspect of the crime as any of crew that currently remained in the building. Grissom had already retained an officer to accompany them out to the Greenway home for a quick interview after they finished up at NorGen.

"Will you be able to let them go home soon?" Dr. Norfield asked hesitantly as Grissom finished storing the sample swabs in an evidentiary bag. He went on quickly, "it's just that they've all been here since eight o'clock this morning…" He glanced at his watch, "actually _yesterday_ morning and they're…well, _we're_ all pretty torn up about this."

Grissom glanced at the clock. It was nearing one o'clock in the morning. "They can go. I have everything I need for now" Grissom addressed the presiding officer. "Just make sure they know they might be brought in for questioning."

The officer nodded and started over to the group of scientists who milled rather uncertainly around the foyer, their matching white lab coats giving the impression of a flock of chickens.

A flash of chestnut colored pony tail in the group caught Grissom's attention. He asked the man next to him, "Who is that?"

Dr. Norfield squinted in the direction Grissom indicated. "That's Deena Michaels. She's…" He stopped himself with a wince. "She _was_ Jonathan's research assistant. She's the one who found the body."

Grissom looked intrigued. "Could I speak to her a moment please?" He asked.

Norfield looked startled. "Sure…but you don't mean…you don't think that Dee could…" He trailed off wide-eyed.

"I don't think anything Dr. Norfield," the CSI said pleasantly. "I just want to talk to her." He neglected to pass on a conventional bit of CSI wisdom – 'first person on the scene, first suspect'.

Deena Michaels was young by the labs standards, probably in her late twenties. Her hair, which at first glance looked to be a match in color with the hair they had retrieved from the body, was longish and pulled back into a neat pony tail. She had somber brown eyes behind wire rimmed glasses and looked every inch the prim and serious scientist.

She stood quietly with her hands clasped in front of her, merely nodding as Norfield presented her to Grissom and made the introductions.

"You were the one that found Dr. Morris?"

"Yes," she replied with economy of words, "I've already spoken to the police." She blinked at him.

"I'm sure you have. I'm with the crime lab. We investigate the physical findings at the scene…"

"I _know_ what the crime lab does," She interrupted coldly. "What do you want to know?"

"Just tell me what happened. What you saw, what you did. Anything at all could be helpful."

"Fine. I was working with Dr. Morris on a cycle. We had been in the clean room all night processing a new batch. Around ten o'clock we finished getting the run set up so I took the reports from the earlier run back to the lab on the second floor to start collating the data. At eleven thirty I went back up to the clean room…" Her face tightened as she remembered. She swallowed heavily and continued, "That was when I saw him."

"Did you enter the room?" Grissom asked.

"Of course I entered the room," the woman replied acerbically. "I'm going to just _assume_ that he's dead because he's lying on the floor?" She shook her head, giving Grissom an unpleasant look. "I cleared both doors to the clean room, checked his carotid pulse, determined he was dead and immediately left to call the police." She crossed her arms over her chest. "Oh, and no. I did not see anyone else on the floor when I got there. Anything else?"

Grissom pursed his lips, unsure whether to be annoyed or amused. "The clean room requires protective gear at all times, right? Coat, booties, mask, gloves, hair covering…at all times?"

She nodded.

"Did you have any of those things on when you entered the clean room to check for a pulse?"

She shook her head. "No, why would I? We put that stuff on in the anteroom, just outside the clean room itself. I wasn't about to take the time to gear up before checking to see if the doctor was okay."

"So your hair was down and uncovered when you checked the doctor?"

Suddenly less hostile, Deena nodded. "You found some of my hair on him didn't you?"

Grissom shrugged. "I can't say for sure, but it could be yours. We'll know more once the DNA results are in. One more question."

She nodded, willing now to be helpful. "Sure."

"Why did you return to the clean room when you did?"

"I found something in the data I was processing that I though the doctor would be interested in."

"Can you tell me what it was?" Grissom inquired curiously.

She shrugged. "Sure, but it doesn't mean much. I was running our experimental study against a control group and the levels of differentiation were way off from the last bunch we did under the same circumstances. I figured we missed a variable somewhere." She gave Grissom a questioning look. "You don't think that could be related do you?"

"Could be anything, could be nothing." Grissom said non-commitally. "Thank you for your time Ms. Michaels. You can go home now too."

As the final member of the NorGen team was ushered out the front, Grissom turned to see Sara push through the frosted glass doors into the lobby, her field kit by her side. She looked preoccupied and he tried in vain to not notice how becoming she looked with her brow furrowed and nose scrunched in concentration.

Dressed simply in jeans and a colorful tank-top, she had left her hair curly today and it rioted around her ears, where she had tucked it to keep it out of her eyes as she worked. He briefly longed to pull it loose and bury his hands in it, but schooled his face to nonchalance as she looked up and met his gaze with a crooked smile.

"All done." She proclaimed looking around the nearly deserted lobby area. "I take it you are too?"

He nodded. "Got a DNA sample from everyone, but I think I found our match to the hair."

Sara raised her eyebrows in query. "Really?" She gave him a tiny smile. "That wouldn't be an _assumption_ would it Griss?"

He ignored her little dig. "Deena Michaels, research assistant to Dr. Morris. She was assisting him in the lab all night and was the one to find the body. She entered the clean room with no barrier garments on so it would have been easy to lose a hair over our vic." He shrugged. "DNA results will back it up one way or the other."

"Good. Lookee what I found." Sara held up an evidence bag containing a small piece of metal.

Grissom smiled. "You found our bullet. Good work."

More pleased by Grissom's mild praise than a ticker tape parade from anyone else, Sara fought down a grin. "Pried it out of the padding in the clean room wall. It's a .38 as David suspected. So what now?"

"We interviewed everyone who logged into the building tonight prior to the attack and got statements from all but one. Care to join me for a visit to Dr. Richard Greenway?"

"Try and stop me." Sara said with a smile.

**A/N:** Many thanks to Foxtoast and Rhee for their invaluable betaing. Without them this would be an extremly comma deficient piece of work!


	2. Chapter 2

**Disclaimer: **Wish I owned them...still don't.

**Breaking Stasis**

By Tallulah

**Chapter 2**

The Tahoe pulled up outside the Greenway residence around 2:00 a.m. with the black and white squad car only a moment behind.

Officer Mel Jacoby raised a hand in greeting as he caught up to them on the sidewalk but didn't bother with pleasantries. His presence was more a formality than anything else, but better to follow procedure – and not need to – than otherwise.

The house itself was fairly nondescript as far as houses go. It wasn't identical to any of the homes immediately surrounding it, but you didn't have to look far down the road to see another just like it with a slightly different paint job. It was a cookie cutter house in one of the many cookie cutter neighborhoods that were starting to pop up in and around Vegas – taking up far less square footage than the usual pricey monsters that crowded in close to the city.

"Does anyone else find it as implausible as I do that Richard Greenway lives on Via Verde?" Sara asked doubtfully. The officer and Grissom both gave her blank looks. She rolled her eyes, a gesture that went unseen in the weak light given off by the street lamp, and waved them towards the house. "Never mind, carry on."

It was never a pleasant chore to wake people in the middle of the night, especially with the type of questions or information that the CSIs usually came armed with, but being on night-shift for as long as they had been had pretty much hardened Grissom and Sara to the task. Still it was something of a relief to step up to Greenway's front door and see the telltale flickering of a television through a crack in the blinds. Suspects were much easier to deal with when they weren't straight from dream land with bed head and morning breath.

Greenway answered the door quickly at Grissom's knock. He obviously hadn't been to bed yet. He wore khakis and a polo shirt, untucked and rumpled at the waist, but they didn't look like he'd been sleeping in them. Approximately 40 years old with a dark mop of hair that was in dire need of a trim, he was tall and skinny with a prominent adam's apple. NorGen certainly seemed to favor a particular 'type' in its personnel.

He gave the group assembled on his doorstep a wary once over. "Kinda late for the Jehovah's Witnesses, isn't it?"

Grissom frowned in puzzlement. "We're not…"

"Mr. Greenway?" Sara interrupted.

"I'm him." His eyes settled on Sara as she stepped forward into the porch light and went from suspicious to appreciative as he gave her the once over from head to toe. "Hello." He even managed a smile.

Sara didn't. "We're with the Las Vegas Crime Lab." She held up her CSI ID and indicated the identical one that hung around Grissom's neck as Jacoby flashed his badge. "We'd like to ask you a few questions."

His expression changed again, this time to confusion. "Why? I mean…sure, but why?"

"Can we come inside?" Grissom asked. "Unless you would _rather_ talk to the police on your front porch at two in the morning." He smiled sweetly.

"Come in, of course." Flustered, Greenway backed into the house gesturing for them to follow. Still uncertain he led them into the family room just off the foyer. He crossed the room to turn off the television which he had apparently muted to answer the door. On the screen, Mulder and Scully faced each other, silently conversing over what appeared to be an alien autopsy for a moment before the TV went dark. "Let me get some lights on in here."

Jacoby loitered in the hallway as Sara and Grissom looked around the room. Greenway seemed out-of-sorts, but it appeared to stem more from having Sara flit around his living space than anything else. He watched her with a keen appreciation that almost immediately got on Grissom's nerves.

She stopped by the fire place to look at a scattering of family type photos across the mantle. Two young gap-toothed children smiled out of the frames, a variety of different shots; vacations and birthdays and then a larger 8x10 that appeared to be the most recent, a formal studio type shot. "Yours?" She asked, indicating the pictures.

He nodded and was quick to point out, "divorced. Four years ago. Their mom took them to live in Tennessee last year." He looked incredulously at Grissom as though expecting commiseration, "Who moves to Tennessee?"

"Elvis?" Grissom ventured with a completely straight face.

Greenway gave him a strange look, apparently trying to decide if he was kidding or not, but gave up. "So what can I do for you guys? You gotta admit it's a bit on the late side."

"Sorry about that Mr. Greenway, but our work doesn't often give us the luxury of scheduling our house calls." Grissom dove in. "Were you at NorGen tonight?"

"Sure. I work there." He seemed to think that was a sufficient answer and went back to watching Sara as she looked around, not even attempting to hide the fact that he was checking out her backside and clearly enjoying the view.

Grissom tried to decide if he was ready to get demonstrably annoyed yet or not, but decided to give it a few more minutes. "Would you care to explain what you were doing at the building so late?"

Greenway shrugged, reluctantly turning his attention away from Sara's assets and back to Grissom, "It's not unusual. I'm support tech. I go in at all hours. The science guys upstairs use equipment and computers at all hours of the day. If something needs tweaking, I tweak it no matter what time of day it is." He made a gesture to encompass the modest surroundings and added wryly, "That's why they pay me the big bucks."

"What was it that needed tweaking tonight?" Sara asked, joining the two men in the center of the room after finishing her brief tour, apparently unaware of the blatant ogling that had taken place while her back was turned.

"I had a server get hosed up. Had to go in and manually reboot. I've got a hardware problem I can't fix, but the replacement one won't be in till next week. Look, it's not that I don't enjoy sharing my curriculum vitae with you, but can you tell me what this is about?"

"Do you know Dr. Jonathan Morris?" Grissom inquired.

"Not to speak to, but I know who he is. He normally works on the third floor in the clean room facility, but I installed some new software in his office on the second floor, oh two weeks ago or so. I guess I could pick the guy out of a line up, but we aren't on each other's Christmas card list or anything."

"He's dead," Sara said bluntly.

"Whoa. Are you serious?" The tech's eyes were round.

"Not the sort of thing I usually joke about," she replied coolly. "He was shot and killed in the clean room lab on the third floor around 10:30." She cocked her head to the side and looked at him with a cynical eye. "You were there around 10:30 weren't you Dick?"

"Rich." He prompted automatically and then realization dawned across his face. "You think I might have had something to do with it." Before either CSI could answer he went on shaking his head vehemently. "No way. I don't even _know_ the guy. I got there a little after 10, went into the server room, rebooted the server, found a back up that hadn't kicked off so I prompted it manually and then I _left_. That was _it_."

"We're not accusing you of anything Mr. Greenway," Grissom said soothingly, leaving out the 'yet' that hung in the air, though unspoken. "We're just collecting information at this point. Can you tell us if you saw or heard anything unusual tonight?"

Placated for the moment the techie looked thoughtful, "No, can't say that I did. I didn't see anyone else there at all. I came in through the side entrance nearest the server room and then left the same way. The only people who usually come in that side are on the tech staff and none of the rest of them are on call."

"And you didn't hear anything?"

"What, you mean like a gunshot?"

Grissom shrugged. "I mean like anything."

"No. The fans on the servers are a lot louder than you might think. You practically have to shout to be heard in there when you're five feet away from someone. I can't imagine any noise from the upper floors carrying down there especially with the sound dampening they have in all the labs."

"So you just happened to enter the building shortly before Doctor Morris was shot and leave shortly after and you didn't hear or see anything at all?" Sara asked pointedly.

"_Yes,_" Greenway stressed. "That is _exactly_ what I am saying." Sara's sarcasm hadn't been lost on him. He redirected his comments to Grissom, his apparent fascination with Sara fading. "Tonight was completely normal, nothing out of the ordinary happened."

"Dr. Morris might disagree," Sara commented neutrally.

Greenway looked exasperated. "Why would I want to kill Dr. Morris?

She ignored the question. "We have surveillance photos of you entering and leaving the building." She was posturing, but felt that it was a pretty safe assumption based on what they knew about NorGen's security. "We'll be using those to verify your account."

"Well good." Greenway actually looked somewhat relieved. "That should back me up. Between that and the timestamp on my keystrokes you should be able to tell I was in the server room the whole time I was in the building. I wasn't there long enough to do anything else." Irritation or exhaustion finally getting the better of him, he continued, "if that's all, I'd appreciate it if you could excuse me. I have to get some sleep."

"Just so you know," Sara told the man on her way out the door, "we have computer experts too. We'll be looking into your account." She followed Jacoby out into the night.

"We'll let you know if we have more questions." Grissom assured the man amiably as he trailed behind her. Sara was one of the few people he had ever worked with where he sometimes felt like he might actually be the more socially competent of the two.

"Is she always this intense?" Greenway asked the senior CSI as he stepped past the home owner onto the front porch.

The two men watched Sara walk down the driveway with her distinctive swinging stride.

"You have no idea," Grissom replied with complete sincerity and followed his CSI out to the waiting SUV.

"Initial thoughts?" Grissom asked once they were back on the road.

"Greenway probably wasn't involved," Sara admitted reluctantly.

"Probably not," Grissom agreed. "Still, have Archie look for him on the surveillance videos just the same."

Sara nodded. I'll get our computer guys to take a look at the time stamp on those keystrokes too. At least then we can officially rule him out based on the time constraint."

Grissom gave her a thoughtful look, "You don't like him for this do you?"

Sara shook her head and checked her mirror, smoothly changing lanes. "Not once he explained why he'd been there. He knows as well as we do how easy corroborating information is to get. Every keystroke and mouse click is recorded for posterity on those drives. It won't take long for us to nail down the times and tell if there was enough leeway for him to have had the opportunity." She put on her blinker and merged onto the exit ramp. "Stranger things have happened though. Time and a warrant for the computer records will tell."

"So if you didn't think he was a viable suspect, why the bad cop routine?"

"He was checking out my ass, Grissom!" She exclaimed indignantly with a tinge of outrage that made him smile.

"Well it is a nice ass," He replied matter-of-factly.

Sara gawped at him unbecomingly for a moment before necessity forced her to turn back to the road. Even in the dim light cast into the cabin by the streetlamps, Grissom could see the flush on her cheeks.

"Stop up here." He gestured at a small diner on the next block.

This close to the strip, pretty much everything was open 24 hours. The small restaurant was no exception. Blazing lights illuminated the parking lot which even at this unworldly hour had a respectable number of cars filling the spaces.

Steering the Tahoe into an available space in the front, Sara put the SUV into park and sat back. "Why are we here exactly?"

"Dinner. They have great sandwiches," Grissom explained as he unbuckled his belt and slid out of the passenger's seat. Noting her hesitation, if not the incredulous look on her face, he amended, "I've heard they have a really a good vegetarian selection too." He shut the door and started toward the diner.

Still feeling as though the last five minutes of her life had taken place in the Twilight Zone, and having little other choice unless she wanted to sit in the car alone, Sara dazedly cut the ignition and got out to follow her boss into the cheery confines of the late night eatery.

Once they were seated at one of the well worn, but clean tables, Sara fiddled with her menu as she watched the man who was solely responsible for complicating most of her adult life pore over the selections with all the enthusiasm of a little kid. Sometimes he could be unquestionably 'boyish' and the incongruity of those occasional moments next to his normal sedate demeanor was incredibly endearing to her.

"Their chicken parmesan is excellent." He enthused and then flipped a few pages forward. "They have an eggplant version too that is probably just as good. It's all in the sauce." He looked up at her then and noted the preoccupied look on her face.

"Everything okay?"

"Why do you do that?" She asked finally with a sigh, laying her menu on the table and interlacing her fingers on top of it.

"Do what?" He looked genuinely perplexed.

"Say things like that."

"Like what?"

Her laugh was humorless. "God Grissom, could you possibly be more obtuse? I'm talking about what you said in the car." She looked away from him then, suddenly very interested in the kitschy bits of memorabilia that lined the diner's walls.

"Oh, the 'nice ass' thing?" He smiled, "Well, It's true; kind of hard not to notice."

She waved off the compliment, slightly angry. "Who knows what you notice Grissom."

"I notice everything about you Sara," he replied softly, taking her off guard.

They sat facing each other in silence, for a few moments actually looking straight at each other for a change. Both knew that what they wanted most in life was sitting right across the table from them, but realized that they may as well have been on separate continents for all the good that the geographical proximity did them. There were too many other obstacles in the way of a happily ever after.

'If I were younger, if I weren't her supervisor.' The thoughts were so familiar as to have worn a groove in Grissom's brain. He gazed at the woman who sat so solemnly across from him, who had finally captured his heart and mind after fifty long years only for him to realize that it was already too late.

'If only he cared enough for nothing else to matter.' For Sara, knowing that he had some feelings for her, but not enough to act on was a constant dull torment. They were of like minds and temperaments, wholly devoted to a life's work that was more a calling than a vocation and both in need of a someone who could fill the gaping holes in their lives. She had known for years that fate had pulled a cruel irony in letting her find him, but never allowing her to be with him. It confirmed a suspicion Sara had long entertained; fate could be a real bitch.

Their server arrived then, a welcome distraction which gave them something other than each other to focus on. She was the archetypal diner waitress complete with massive updo and cracking gum. She intoned her greeting and the days specials on offer in a flat monotone usually reserved for automated voicemal greetings. By the time she jotted down their requests and left with the menus, the moment, as it always did, had passed and they faced each other once again as coworkers and nothing more.

Tacitly setting aside the minor confrontation without discussion, they instead reviewed the case over their sandwiches, relaying information from the scene Sara had processed and the witnesses Grissom had interviewed in between bites.

Grissom had been right about the eggplant parmesan. It was excellent. Their hands touched once as they both reached for the salt shaker at the same time, but neither acknowledged the moment. They were each back on their own side of the fence that separated them. Back on familiar ground where they both pretended that they didn't care for the other and that the other didn't care for them. Though the brush of his fingers was like a live wire, Sara merely sighed inwardly and reached for another fry.

Shortly after the check was delivered Grissom's cell phone rang. He took the call as Sara pooled their money into a single pile for the waitress to pick up and waited for him to finish.

"That was Brass," Grissom said, snapping the cell closed and clipping it back to his belt. "He's back at the station. He spoke to Morris' wife and suggested we wait 'till tomorrow sometime if we're going to stop by and talk to her. She was pretty broken up."

Sara nodded as they made their way out the door, hesitating only briefly as Grissom held the door open for her. "We heading back to the lab?"

"Yeah. Robbins should have completed the autopsy by the time we get there and you can have Ballistics run your bullet. After that unless we get anything probative, we'll call it a night and get started early tomorrow so we can pay a visit to Mrs. Morris while the sun's still up.

Al Robbins, the night-shift coroner, had in fact completed the autopsy by the time Grissom and Sara returned to the city's crime lab. Still wearing the hospital scrubs he donned to perform the post-mortems on those unfortunate enough to make an appearance in his morgue, he greeted them by name as they pushed through the doors that led into his chilly domain. "Hello Sara. Gil." He stood up from the low stool he had appropriated to adjust his prosthetic leg. He got around quite well on it, but it still needed occasional maintenance.

"Hey Al," Grissom replied. "Have you processed our 419 from NorGen yet?

"Your DB from the lab is over there." He indicated the far left of two bodies that lay on the stainless steel autopsy tables. At Sara's questioning look he identified the closer of the two. "DUI. Single-car accident. Man versus concrete barrier…the barrier won." He grimaced.

Sara and Grissom each chose a side of the table as Robbins limped over to officiate his findings. He flipped open a standard metal medical chart for reference. "Pretty cut and dry on this one guys. Single GSW to the abdomen, perforated the liver and right kidney before exiting the body at the eighth thoracic vertebrae causing him to bleed out. Cause of death was exsanguination. Damage is consistent with a .38 caliber round. No bullet though. It was a through and through."

Grissom nodded, not looking up from the intricate workings of the human body displayed in front of him. He hadn't earned the moniker 'Gruesome Grissom' for nothing. His fascination with the more grisly aspects of their jobs sustained him in situations that would normally send even the most hardened of crime scene investigators running. "Sara found the bullet buried in the clean room wall at our crime scene. We're running it through ballistics now."

Robbins smiled at Sara over the body. "Good job. Any leads yet?"

She shook her head smiling. Praise from Robbins was nearly as satisfying as it was from Grissom. She had nothing but respect and admiration for the man who had made it his career to be the last voice to speak for the victims of violent crimes that crossed his table. "Nothing much so far. We don't have a lot to go on. Aside from the bullet and a hair that we think is irrelevant to the actual murder, we don't have _anything_ to go on. No motive to speak of either. Hopefully we'll turn up something more after we get the ballistics report back and have a chance to talk to the widow."

"We'll head back to NorGen tomorrow to take a look at our good doctor's office and see if we can get some more information from his coworkers." Looking up from his inspection of the body Grissom asked, "Anything else we should know about our scientist?"

"No." Robbins shook his head. "Aside from the shot that killed him, Dr. Morris was in surprisingly good shape for his age…when you consider he was one of those scientific types who regularly forget to eat and sleep," He stopped here and looked meaningfully at both Sara and Grissom, "I would usually expect to see early signs of heart disease or cardiovascular problems, at the very least high cholesterol." He gestured at the body. "I hate to sound cliché, but aside from being dead, our guy is really healthy." The coroner closed the metal clipboard and clasped it to his chest. "I can tell you that he was careful with his diet and exercised regularly. I don't know if that's probative." He shrugged. "But that's why I'm a coroner and you're a CSI."

"That and the righteous threads." Sara gave the coroner the full bore 'Sara Sidle' smile. "Thanks a lot Doc." She headed towards the doors stripping off her own scrubs as she went. "I'm going to run down to ballistics and see if Bobby has anything for me yet."

Robbins surveyed their victim sadly, "it is a shame, isn't it Gil?" He glanced up at his long time friend and coworker who was looking at him inquiringly. "Exercise, eat right…" "And die anyway." Grissom finished for him with no trace of humor. "Especially when you're helped along your way by a well placed .38 caliber bullet." He backed away from the table, stripping out of his scrubs as Sara had. "Thanks Al. As always, your help is appreciated."

"Anytime, Gil. I have donuts and real coffee back in my office if you want to stop by." Robbins offered as he limped towards the door on his crutch.

"Thanks, but no." Grissom shook his head. "Sara and I stopped for dinner on our way back in."

"Really?" Robbins looked surprised. "Just the two of you?" He gave Grissom a meaningful look which the CSI studiously chose to ignore.

"Well that's the funny thing about being a carbon based life form, Al: sometimes you gotta eat."

"Does Sara know about this?" Robbins replied with mock seriousness.

"Not so you'd notice, no."

"Gil." Robbins stopped forcing Grissom to stop as well to avoid crashing into him. He turned around. "Can I tell you something?" Grissom said nothing, which Robbins took as permission to continue. "I have been at this post for more years than I can count. I see tragic deaths every day and I've learned to leave most of it behind me when I go home, but do you know what it is that I take with me on purpose when I walk out that door?

"What's that Al?" Grissom's face was inscrutable, his tone unnaturally even. For any of his CSIs this would be the moment it occurred to them that they needed to be somewhere else very fast, but Robbins didn't quell under the supervisors steady gaze the way the members of his team would. Greg Sanders would likely have escaped out of the room as fast as his legs could carry him, but the coroner simply ignored him and continued.

"The knowledge that life is short. And that there will always be a last chance to do something that you should have done." He pushed the door opened and left the dim light of the morgue for the harsh fluorescence of the Crime Lab halls. "Which is why the first and last thing I do every day is kiss my wife and tell her that I love her. I don't want to be caught up short when it gets to be my last chance." He turned and started down the hall. "Have a good one Gil."

Grissom stood where Robbins had left him, lips pursed and a nonplussed expression on his face.

He was still there a minute later when Sara came striding up to him from the direction of the Ballistics Lab. "Hey Griss, what's up?"

Snapping out of his reverie, Grissom started towards his office with the leggy brunette in tow. "Any news from Bobby?"

"Only that he'll get back to me tomorrow." Seeing her supervisor's questioning look, she elaborated. "Back log. There was a gang shooting on swing that means a box full of bullets and a truck load of guns to match them to for our fearless ballistics expert." She leaned against the frame of the doorway into Grissom's office as he settled behind the desk, a dark look crossing his features as he surveyed the pile of paperwork that seemed to have grown in his absence. "Bobby is working straight through to get it all done. He said he'll have any results for me by the start of shift tomorrow."

"I'd rather have them sooner, but I guess even Bobby can't perform _actual_ miracles."

Sara gave him a lopsided smile. "Don't let him hear you say that. He'd be offended."

Grissom gave her a small grin in return and then started flipping through the stacks of folders that littered his desk. Never a fan of paperwork of any kind, Grissom was beleaguered by the sheer quantity he was forced to deal with as supervisor. It wasn't quite as bad when Catherine was around and willing (if reluctant) to pitch in, but in the week and half she had been out the usual influx seemed to have begun multiplying like tribbles.

"Why don't you go ahead home and get some sleep, Sara." He offered and held up a hand to forestall the immediate refusal he knew was coming simply by the look on her face. "I know you could work straight through, but I'd rather we get started fresh next shift. We're going to have to come in early anyway in order to talk to Mrs. Morris and the regular staff at the lab." He gestured at the chaos on his desk. "I'm going home as soon as I've gotten through this mess. I'll see you in the afternoon."

"Do you want some help?"

Though he knew Sara would use almost any excuse to keep from being sent home in the middle of a case, Grissom was still surprised at her offer. Field work was her forte. She grumbled about the reams of paperwork that went with being a county employee almost as much as he did. "Uh, no. Um…that's not necessary I…"

"Come on, Grissom." She chided good-naturedly. She slouched into the chair across the desk from him, her elbows propped on the armrests. "You know as well as I do that I won't sleep if I go home now. With this many hours to kill I'd probably just alphabetize my movie collection." She gestured at the stacks of files. "At least this would give me something useful to do."

"I don't know how useful it is," Grissom replied mordantly, wishing he could convince her somehow to take better care of herself without overstepping the self imposed boundaries of their relationship. Instead he simply relented, pushing a pile of folders her way without a word.

She grabbed the top file off the stack and said, "Just think how invaluable this experience will be for me when I decide to go for a supervisor's position."

"Are you interested in becoming a supervisor?" He tried to keep the combination of incredulousness and disappointment he immediately felt out of his voice. No matter whether it was right of him to feel this way or not, he didn't want to lose her.

"That was a joke, Grissom." She flashed him a smile. "No way I could be a supervisor." She held up the file. "Too much paperwork." She settled more comfortably into her chair with the first file open in her lap, lines crinkling her forehead as she frowned in concentration.

Grissom sat back in his chair with a stack of forms that needed signing and wished he felt less relieved than he did. She deserved every chance to further her career without regard to his feelings. If she were to have any hope for advancement, he knew she would have to leave the lab. Her numerous run-ins with Ecklie had ruined any chances she might have had at being promoted in-house. The idea of losing her not only from his team, but from the lab and possibly even Las Vegas itself, sent a small thrill of fear through him that he tried desperately to squelch.

He watched the lovely women curled up across the desk and allowed himself a moment of unguarded affection. Her intelligence, fire, and quick wit were what had attracted her to him. All reasons he had invited her to work for him in Vegas in the first place; they had been his undoing. He still couldn't say when it had happened. One day he just…realized that she wasn't just his student anymore. She had looked at him across the table in the layout room and smiled; all twinkling eyes and gap toothed grin, and he knew he was in trouble. For that one shining moment he had thought 'what if…' and then reality had come crashing down as he came to the full realization of who he was and where they were and how 'they' could never be.

He knew that there was some attraction on her part and that made it all the more difficult. He had to believe that any tender feelings she might have developed for him stemmed more from her self-professed need for validation than any real partiality for him. Whether it was humility or good old fashioned pessimism, Gil Grissom; aged fifty could not fathom the idea of a beautiful thirty-four year old woman with all the charms of Sara Sidle preferring him to anyone else.

Sara, of course, couldn't imagine it any other way.

The pair worked quietly through the early morning until the paperwork deluge was down to a small trickle. When they caught each other both trying to stifle huge yawns they shared a smile and agreed it was time to call it a morning.

"I'll see you later this afternoon," Grissom said as he banished the last of the files to one corner of his desk for delivery to Ecklie's office…hopefully before its resident showed up for the day.

Sara nodded as she stretched languorously in her chair. "Ummhmm."

Grissom averted his eyes, but not before getting a tantalizing view of her midriff; smooth white skin peeking through the gap between her tank top and the waistband of her jeans as she extended her arms above her head, working the kinks out of her shoulders and back.

She stood, speaking through another yawn as she rose. "See you…this…afternoon." She turned towards the door.

"Hey Sara?"

"Yeah?"

"Get some sleep…okay?"

Her lips curled up in a slight smile. "Sure thing boss." She started out the door and then stopped at the threshold, her usual spot. "Griss?"

He raised his eyebrows in acknowledgement.

"You too…okay?"

He smiled. "You got it."

And she was gone.

**A/N:** Thanks be once again to Foxtoast for her thoughtful contributions to my severely punctuation deficient work. Rhee, I have no doubt your input was great, but I still can't get into YTDAW to get to it!


	3. Chapter 3

**Disclaimer: **Wish I owned them...still don't. 

**Breaking Stasis**

By Tallulah

**Chapter 3**

Sara felt mildly out of sorts leaving her apartment while the sun was still up. She often worked past the end of her shift and well into the next day so she was accustomed to going home under the bright Las Vegas sky, but it was rare to start actually start a shift before dark. It said something about the nature of their planned visit today. They would never hesitate to confront a suspect at home in the middle of the night, but they would do everything in their power to treat the spouse of a victim with kid gloves…unless the bereaved and the suspect ended up being one and the same, of course.

She trudged into the break room a few minutes ahead of schedule and wasn't at all surprised to see Grissom already present, head bowed over a short stack of papers, a cup of coffee and a pastry bag from a local bakery next to his elbow.

She crossed behind him to the coffee maker, grimacing at the ages old coffee left in the pot by the morning shift and set about making a new one. "Don't tell me that stuff is starting to spontaneously generate. I thought we finished all of it last night."

Grissom looked up to see her preparing the coffee maker. "Don't do that." He pushed the cup and bag across the table towards her and looked at her over the top of his glasses, "two sugars, no cream…oh and a multigrain bagel." He dropped his gaze back down to the paperwork. "Ecklie caught me skulking into his office this morning to drop off the files we finished last night and rewarded me for all of our hard work by giving me requisition forms to fill out." He paused thoughtfully. "You think he'd let me requisition someone to do all of this paperwork?"

"Probably not." She sat across from him eyeing the proffered goodies.

"Take them," Grissom said, seeing her hesitate. "I got them for you."

"But what about…"

He held up a second cup of coffee from where he had been resting it on his knee. "I got myself one too."

"But why…"

He looked at her again, "have you eaten today?"

"Not yet."

"Well, that's why." He went back to his work, making occasional notations as he checked inventories.

Moderately perplexed, Sara nonetheless took a sip of the coffee, two sugars no cream as advertised, wondered briefly how he knew what she took in her coffee, and dug into the bag. In addition to a ridiculously large multigrain bagel, she also pulled out three small tubs of cream cheese: plain, low fat and honey walnut. She looked at them uncomprehendingly.

Noting her blank expression, Grissom explained, "I uh…wasn't sure which one you liked so…"

"So you bought all three?"

"Uh…Yeah." He wasn't looking at her now, but kept his head down, studying the inventory sheets industriously.

She noted that the tips of his ears had turned pink and buried a smile in her cup. "Griss, if I didn't know any better, I'd think you cared," She said playfully.

"How could I not?" His voice was soft.

Startled, her head snapped up. "What?"

He slowly raised his head to meet her eyes which he held for a long moment, unblinking. When he finally spoke he sounded almost apologetic. "You should probably go ahead and eat so we can get going. I want to go by the lab and talk to Deena Michaels again, get some more detail about the experiments that she and Dr. Morris were running the night he died."

Annoyed at herself for trying to find significance in anything he said and wondering why she still looked after all this time, Sara stood, putting the bagel back in its bag. "Sure, fine. I can eat later; just let me put this…"

"Sara." His voice sounded weary. "We have time. Just go ahead and eat."

Feeling absurdly as though she were being chastised for something, she complied, sitting silently back down across from him, the hum of the labs air conditioner the only sound between them as she worked her way through the breakfast Grissom had brought for her.

"I'm going to go talk to Bobby before we go." She stated a few minutes later, brushing crumbs into a small pile to dump in the trash. "I'll see if he has my ballistics report ready and meet you out at the Tahoe. You want to drive?"

Grissom looked surprised, as though he had forgotten she was in the room. "Uh…yeah. Okay. I'll meet you outside." He started to gather his things together.

Sara shook her head as she walked away, wondering in vain, and not for the first time, what strange quirk of fate it was that had drawn her so inexorably to this brilliant, handsome, fascinating, frustrating man that drove her nowhere but crazy.

One of Grissom's many quotes popped into her head as she strode down the hall; 'The mind decides, but the heart chooses.' As much as she wished that she could stop having feelings for the inscrutable Gil Grissom, she knew she couldn't change how she felt any more than she could change the fact that she had brown eyes. With a sigh she turned the corner and headed for the remote corner of the ballistics lab, as always pushing thoughts of Grissom to the back of her mind to be dealt with when she wasn't on a case.

Bobby Dawson presided over the ballistics lab with a nonchalance that could only be achieved by being a true genius in the field. He could tell you anything you needed to know about a gun based on the smallest amount of ballistics evidence. More than one case had broken open based on information that the gun expert was able to glean from mere fragments. He could also field strip an M1 rifle in less than thirty seconds. Today however, he looked all in. The long night of test fires and squinting behind the comparison microscope had left him red eyed and bleary and as Sara came up on him behind his workstation, asleep.

Sara couldn't help but grin at the endearing sight he presented. He had crashed while taking notes and face planted in the middle of a manila folder which was rapidly getting soggy from where he had drooled in his sleep. His wavy hair stuck out in unruly spikes no doubt from repeatedly donning his ear protection during the tests and as she approached the sleeping lab tech he gave a low snuffling snore. Making a mental note to avoid actually touching the folder if that was in fact her case file he was drowning, she gave his shoulder a gently nudge.

"Hey Bobby. Wakey wakey."

"Hmm?" He sat up abruptly, the file folder firmly stuck to his cheek.

Sara laughed and Bobby gave a wry grin, peeling the offending office supply off of his face. "And a good morning to you too Ms. Sidle." He rubbed the red impressions left behind by the creases in the folder. "All right for some people to be wide awake." He grumbled good-naturedly and then yawned. "What can I do you for?"

"Nice to see you all bright tailed and bushy eyed there, Dawson." Sara couldn't help her smile. "I hate to interrupt your beauty rest mid-REM, but I was hoping you might have my report on the slug from the NorGen labs shooting."

"Anything for you," he said, standing up and giving a spine popping stretch before rummaging through the neat stacks on his desk and handing her a blessedly dry folder. "I was able to fit it in between my reenactments of Grand Theft Auto last night." He indicated the bristling arsenal that was laid out and tagged on his work station and settled back into his chair. Aside from a righteous case of desk head and the red lines across his cheek, no one would ever suspect that he had just woken up.

"Well you already knew it was a .38 caliber Smith and Wesson. What you probably don't know is that your gun has a record. I put your slug through the wringer and came up with a hit." He gestured at the folder she held in her hand.

Sara looked surprised. "Really?" Flipping the file open to read Bobby's comments she raised an eyebrow. "Well, how about that?"

"Can I assume that's a rhetorical question and go back to sleep?" The tech asked, already reassuming the position Sara had found him in.

"Sweet dreams" she replied and patted him on his head on the way out.

-------------------------------

"Hey Griss," Sara called out as she exited the building and headed for Grissom's Tahoe waving the ballistics report. "Bobby traced our murder weapon."

Grissom pulled his glasses off from where he had been perusing a heavy three ring binder. "Really? I'll call Brass and tell him we have to pay a visit before we hit the lab. Where're we going?"

"Good news, we're going to save on gas. It's a two-fer, Brass won't even have to make a u-turn. We're heading back to NorGen." She handed the file to her boss, but supplied the name before he had a chance to open it, "Dr. Brent Norfield."

Grissom raised his eyebrows. "Our nervous lab director?"

Sara shrugged. "I'd be nervous too if I were being questioned about a murder that I had committed." She climbed into the passenger seat and accepted the binder Grissom had been reading without a word as he settled into the driver's seat. "The report says that a gun with the same rifling characteristics was used in a self-defense shooting two years ago. The vic was a Damian Tyler, out on parole for two days before he attempted to car jack Dr. Norfield and his wife Elaine with a knife."

"The first rule of warfare: never bring a knife to a gunfight."

"Yeah, well the vic didn't get that memo and it got him dead. No charges were filed. Dr. Norfield pled self defense. There were a handful of witnesses that attested to the fact and the whole thing was dropped. The bullet was still entered into evidence though and tied back to our doc for the sake of posterity."

"Lucky for us." Grissom observed, putting the SUV into reverse.

"Not so lucky for Dr. Norfield." Sara finished.

She turned a curious eye to the large binder in her lap. "And what is this exactly?"

"Look it over. Tell me what you think."

She flipped open the plain blue cover and paged through a variety of introductions and disclaimers. She read silently for several minutes. Grissom remained quiet, allowing her time to assimilate the information and simply concentrated on driving.

"This is research from one of Dr. Morris' studies," she declared finally. "Is this from the one he was working on when he died?

"No, this one was published last month. It was used in the labs petition for increased research grants when the feds did their audit."

"Hmm." She continued to read. "This was co-written by Morris and a Dr. Simon Ayers." She looked over at Grissom, brow furrowed. "Do we know him?"

"We know of him," Grissom replied. "He wasn't at the lab at the time of the shooting, but he is on staff. Apparently he and Dr. Morris worked together closely on several of these grant-yielding studies."

"Oh, the rainmakers, huh?"

Grissom cast her a questioning glance. "Rainmakers?"

"Yeah, you know. The guys that bring in the bucks."

"Ah."

"NorGen labs does all kinds of R&D for the government and private industry, but all of those studies are very specific to what has been requested by the donating bodies. Big wins like this," she tapped the folder with a fingernail, "bring in the kind of grant money that means you have a little cash flow to branch out in other areas. The guys that enable that kind of flexibility are invaluable in commercial medicine. No wonder Norfield was so sorry to see him go. Kinda makes you wonder why he'd kill him"

"I don't bother wondering about what motivates people anymore. We'll make it a priority to talk to Dr. Ayers while we're in the neighborhood." Grissom guided the SUV along the side street leading up to the lab; the imposing grey building just visible over the next rise. "Right after we find out why Dr. Norfield neglected to tell us that he packs heat."

-------------------------------

"It honestly didn't occur to me." A wide eyed lab director addressed the two investigators and their accompanying police detective from the chair behind the desk in his cluttered office. He had slumped into it in disbelief when Sara questioned him about the gun registered in his name. "I started carrying it five or six years ago, but I don't anymore."

"And why is that Dr. Norfield?" Captain Brass inquired.

"Kids." He replied simply. "My oldest grandson gets into everything now. He's four." He added as though this would explain everything. "I used to keep it in the car when I drove, but I took it out because I was afraid Adam would find it."

"Do you still own the gun?" Grissom asked, trying to maintain his patience.

"Well, yeah. I mean, why would I get rid of it? I just don't want my son's kid to end up shooting himself so I don't keep it at home anymore"

"Where is the gun now?" Sara asked, finally cutting straight to the point.

Norfield's eyes went even bigger – if it were possible. "Here. I keep it here."

Grissom and Sara exchanged a wordless glance, Brass raised an eyebrow. "Dr. Norfield," he began, "We are really going to need to take that gun."

Nodding, the doctor began rooting around in his desk drawers, babbling more or less coherently. "I started keeping it here when Adam started getting into everything. My wife baby-sits him so he's over at the house all the time. I don't see how it could have been my gun that killed Jonathan. I keep the drawer locked all the time." He froze, face going pale. "You don't think it was _me_ do you?" He put a hand to his forehead. "Oh God, oh God. Elaine told me not to get that gun. She kept telling me it was bad news, but I don't know what would have happened if I hadn't had it when that man …"

Hoping to stem the verbal tirade, Grissom interjected, "Dr. Norfield, we don't think you did anything. We just need to take the gun to test it for fingerprints. If you didn't do it, then the evidence will tell us that. Just calm down and show us where you keep it."

Still pale and shaking, the doctor took a deep calming breath and opened the center drawer of his desk, extracting a set of keys. He separated one out from the rest, taking a couple of tries to do so with the steady tremble in his hands. He held it out to Sara and indicated a filing cabinet by the door. "In there." He pushed his chair away from the desk as though he wanted to be as far away from the thing as possible when it was removed from the drawer.

Sara extracted the firearm from its resting place with a latex glove which she carefully wrapped around the grip rather than putting it on. She handed the keys back to Grissom and carefully turned the piece around. "It's a Ruger .357." She held it up to her nose and sniffed delicately. "Certainly hasn't been cleaned in a while, could have been fired recently." She cocked her head at the doctor who remained frozen in his chair. "We'll have to take this back to the lab with us to have it tested against the bullet we found in Dr. Morris."

The doctor nodded once, but otherwise remained motionless.

Grissom donned a pair of gloves from Sara's kit and deftly unloaded the weapon, noting the single empty chamber. He slid the gun and the remaining bullets into separate evidence bags which Sara labeled and stashed in her kit.

"Thank you doctor." Grissom said, as they packed up to go to their next stop on the second floor. "Don't worry. If you didn't do this, we'll prove it."

"Of course if you did do it," Sara added cheerfully, "We'll prove that, too."

Dr. Norfield put his head down on his desk and didn't say a word as the investigators backed out of the room.

"Well," Brass began as they repeated their march up the same spiral staircase they had climbed the previous night. "I know one thing. I hate these stairs."

"We could have taken the elevator." Sara offered.

"Now, you tell me." Brass complained affably. "So, what do we think of the good doctor Norfield?"

"He's got all the backbone of a deroceras reticulatum," Grissom commented, bringing up the rear as the trio trudged up the steps.

Brass looked over his shoulder and gave Sara a blank look. She smiled.

"Umm…it's a slug…you know, an invertebrate? No spine?"

"I get it, I get it." Brass rolled his eyes as he stepped out of the stairway onto the second floor foyer and used the temporary keycard the receptionist had supplied him with to open the door. "You CSIs are a laugh riot you know that?"

"We try." Grissom gave a one sided smile as he stepped past him into the hallway.

"I take that to mean you don't think he did it?" Brass asked Sara as they proceeded down the hallway.

"Take it to mean that the evidence isn't in yet so we don't know whether he did it or not, but no, it doesn't seem likely," Grissom called from ahead of them.

"Right, of course." Brass rolled his eyes again for Sara's benefit and they shared a smile.

While the third floor was as spotlessly clean and sterile as a hospital room, the second floor gave off the musty feel of academia. Each of the labs researchers did their hands-on work either in the third floor clean rooms or even further up in the labs on the fourth floor. Down here it was all private offices which allowed for some of the individual personalities of the staff to come through. A red bumper sticker declaring 'If this bumper sticker is blue, you're driving too fast' was pasted outside one of the open office doors. It made Sara smile – physics humor. The carpeted floors, bulletin boards and cubbyhole mailboxes reminded her vividly of the time she spent dawdling outside her professor's offices during grad school.

That impression was only made stronger when they stopped outside Jonathan Morris' office which had been sealed with several strips of crime scene tape. Aside from the tape itself, the interior looked like the inside of every physics professor's office that Sara had ever had. A computer hummed quietly on the desk, its screen saver blooming colored boxes at random intervals. Books crowded every square inch of shelf space and many others were piled in boxes or neat stacks in the corners. A double helix model took up a good portion of the desk space and several perpetual motion models graced the top of a filing cabinet. Every square inch of remaining horizontal space was taken up with neatly ordered print outs, presumably from the Doctors own research.

Grissom pulled down the crime scene tape and he and Sara made their way around the room looking for anything that might help lead them back to a suspect.

Sara stopped in front of the desk and examined the personal effects the doctor had chosen to surround himself with. Several brightly crayoned pieces of construction paper exhibiting the careless scrawl of a young child were tacked to the wall. Two framed photos sat close to the monitor where he would have been most easily able to see them. One was a young woman, medium length blonde hair tossed over her shoulder, a laughing smile on her face as sparkling hazel eyes bore straight into the camera's lens. The other was the same woman sitting outdoors on a blanket with a small child in her lap. The woman's face was cast down as she gazed at the little girl in her lap with a tender smile, but the child's inquisitive face was turned up towards the camera as though trying to puzzle out what it was.

Sara experienced a sudden pang as she wondered who had been on the other side of the camera. Had it been Dr. Morris? Was that little girl looking up at him? Who were those people to him? A daughter and granddaughter perhaps? Her chest tightened and she allowed herself to revel in it for a moment before steeling herself to do the one thing she could for those people – the ones he left behind – finding out who took him away from them.

They collected what they could from the scene though there wasn't much that seemed probative. A box of files and data was packed up and waiting to return to the crime lab with them where they could spend more time perusing their contents.

After sending an officer up to retrieve the boxes, Sara and Grissom wandered further down the hall to a large office that sported four desks spread out across the room. The tag outside the door identified the occupants as four of the research assistants, Deena Michaels among them.

The other three desks sat unoccupied, though it was obvious that was only temporary; scattered debris and stacks of paperwork attested to current ownership of all three. Deena sat in the far corner talking to Brass. Her eyes were red rimmed and hollow as though she hadn't slept, but she was dry eyed and articulate.

"I wish there was something else I could tell you," she said regretfully. "I greatly admired Dr. Morris. I thought he work he did here was amazing."

Grissom sat down opposite the woman and pushed a binder similar to the one Sara had been inspecting earlier across the desk. "Can you tell me if this is part of the data you were looking at for Dr. Morris last night?"

She pulled it towards her and flipped through several pages. "Yeah, this is it. This is all of the compiled data though. The stuff I did last night is here." She handed him a folder full of print outs covered in cryptic numbers and symbols. "We're working on mapping the predictors for Alzheimer's," she explained. "The outcome of these experiments is highly anticipated by the genetics community and we've been seeing some incredible correlations in our test runs. Dr. Morris was over the moon." She gave a small laugh. "To be honest I think he was shocked to see such obvious patterns emerge so quickly." She looked over at Grissom. "That was why I was so interested in speaking to him before I left last night. We did the final run and I would normally have left the data to be extrapolated the next day, but Dr. Morris thought something looked off so he asked me to go ahead and do it."

"And did you find anything out of the ordinary?" Grissom prompted.

"Well yeah, it's like I told you last night. We had done a bunch of these runs and were starting to see some definite predictors just pop out at us and then when I ran the last bunch from last night there was…nothing."

"Nothing?" Brass prompted.

"Nothing," She reiterated. "I mean like no correlations at all. It wasn't even like we had moved on to a new series; we were still testing the same one that had given us such amazing results before. We were testing the same batch we had tested last time and came up with completely different results. We matched the control group better than we did the previous runs." She looked thoughtful. "I did think it was strange the he wanted to run yet another series when we had already been so thorough over the past couple of months, but I guess it's a good thing he did. This might mean that the study has to start over with fresh data." She looked worried. "I hope it isn't too insensitive of me to be concerned about something like that. It's just that I hate to think of all the work Dr. Morris did getting discredited after his death."

"How long had you been working together on this particular study?" Sara asked.

"Just the two of us? Not for very long. Maybe a month or two? The Alzheimer's predictors were one of the main developments that Dr. Morris and Dr. Ayers presented when they applied for the grant extensions. The two of them had been working on it together. The grant committee was very excited about it," she added.

"Why would Ayers have given up such a high profile study?" Sara asked curiously.

"Oh, he didn't," Deena explained. "He's still involved, just with different cycles than we were running. Dr. Morris and Dr. Ayers rarely worked together on these types of studies. They work separately and then collaborate on the results. It gives them a basis for comparison that isn't affected by any unintentional bias on their part." She shifted uncomfortably. "Also, I don't think they liked each other very much."

Sara raised her eyebrows. "Oh really? What makes you say that?"

It was apparent that they were heading into awkward territory for the young RA. She was obviously trying to be forthcoming, but at the same time hated to even inadvertently implicate a co-worker.

She hastened to qualify her statements. "Don't get me wrong. I don't think they hated each other or anything. Dr. Ayers is just much more about the money than Dr. Morris is…was. Dr. Morris was purely about science for the sake of science and the funding be damned. I think he felt that Dr. Ayers spent too much of his time and energy on grant proposals. He said they should just do the work and let the results speak for themselves. I overheard them arguing once and Dr. Morris suggested that Dr. Ayers was manipulating the data to make the results seem more favorable in order to impress the grant committee." She looked beseechingly at each of the investigators. "He wouldn't ever do anything to Dr. Morris. Dr. Ayers is _supposed_ to worry about bringing money into the lab. That's part of his job. He's the one who decides which studies get submitted for consideration."

"Do you have any idea where we might find Dr. Ayers now?" Grissom asked.

"No," Deena replied with a shake of her head. "I mean, I know he's not here. He's been out of town for a few days. He's not supposed to be back until later this week." She gave a deep sigh. "You know, as terrible as it is that Dr. Morris is dead, I'm just having a hard time wrapping my brain around the fact that someone actually killed him. What a waste, you know? He had so much to offer the world…" she trailed off.

"Thanks for your help Ms. Michaels," Brass said handing the girl one of his business cards. "If you think of anything else, go ahead and give me a call."

The three investigators thanked the RA and left her at her desk, staring forlornly at a spot in the carpet.

"So what does your spidey-sense tell you about Dr. Ayers?" Brass asked as they jogged down the spiraling stairs.

"I think I'd like to pay him a visit," Grissom replied. "Assuming we can find him of course."

"You guys go ahead out to the Morris homestead," Brass suggested. "I'll drop by HR and see if I can't get the 411 on our missing scientist."

At the bottom of the staircase they split up with one last admonishment from Brass: "Walk softly with the wife, guys. She went to pieces when I told her about her husband."

Grissom looked mildly affronted. "Of course Jim. When am I ever anything other than tactful?"

"I don't suppose there is any good way to respond to that is there?" Brass asked Sara as they looked after Grissom's retreating back.

"No," Sara replied with a laugh. "There really isn't."

**A/N: **Once again, much praise must be bestowed upon Foxtoast and Rhee - without their input this would really be just a random string of occasionally related words tied together with poor punctuation. Any mistakes in the final version are all mine. You guys rock and I thank you!


	4. Chapter 4

**Disclaimer: **No, they STILL aren't mine.

**Breaking Stasis**

By Tallulah

**Chapter 4**

"So Dr. Ayers didn't show up on the manifest from the night of the shooting, huh?" Sara climbed into the passenger seat next to Grissom and started paging through her notes.

"No." Grissom backed the SUV out and pulled smoothly into traffic. "That doesn't mean he wasn't in the building though. There's nothing to stop more than one person from entering when the locks are disengaged."

"So you think this guy looks promising?"

"There's nothing inherently probative about two co-workers not liking each other," Grissom replied, thinking briefly of his barely civil relationship with Conrad Ecklie. "Still, I think it's worth looking into."

Sara smiled to herself, knowing just where Grissom's thoughts had turned. There wasn't anyone with the lab, or Las Vegas law enforcement as a whole for that matter, who didn't know about Grissom's blatant contempt for the crime lab director.

"I'll have Archie run the surveillance tapes and look for anyone piggy-backing off of another employee to get in the building."

Grissom nodded, eyes intent on the traffic in front of him. "Pull the log for the keycards too. We'll see if we can't match the log to the tapes and get a positive ID."

"Sure thing." She pulled out her cell phone and carried on a short conversation with Archie's voice mail, making a mental note to have the log on his desk before he came in to start his shift that evening.

A few minutes later Grissom pulled up to the curb in front of the Morris' home. It was all red brick, almost colonial – a rare style for Vegas where glass and concrete prevailed. The house was set a respectable distance from the road, the lawn attractively xeriscaped so as to need little or no watering.

They jogged up the steps and rang the bell. As the sound died within the house, the two criminalists steeled themselves to deal with the bereaved family. This part of the job never got any easer, and not for the first time Grissom wished he possessed more of an ability to deal with the people part of this job.

The door swung open just enough to reveal a casually dressed middle-aged woman who looked as though she hadn't slept in a while. Her voice was low. "Can I help you?"

"Mrs. Morris?"

The woman looked confused for a moment. "Me? Oh, no, Jenna Morris is my daughter." She made no move away from the door. "Can I ask what this is about?"

Grissom held up his id. "I'm Gil Grissom and this is Sara Sidle. We're with the Crime Lab. We'd like to speak to your daughter for a few minutes."

"Now isn't a good time. Could you maybe come back later?" The woman flushed under Grissom's gaze, but held her ground. "I am sure you understand that this is a difficult time for her...for all of us."

"Ma'am, I understand that this is a trying time and I know you want nothing more than to protect your daughter from any further pain, but we are investigating Dr. Morris' murder and in this type of case, time truly is of the essence."

As she stood in the doorway, trying to formulate another refusal, a voice drifted over her shoulder from the depths of the house. "Its okay mom, they can come in."

The woman at the door made an exasperated sound, threw Grissom and Sara a displeased look and stepped back from the door. "Please make this quick," she said sotto voice as they passed her into the foyer. "She isn't in good health."

"We'll keep it as short as we can ma'am." Grissom's voice was soothing and matched hers in volume. "The last thing we want is to make this harder on Mrs. Morris than we have to. We know there's more than one victim in a case like this."

She gave him an appraising look and must have seen something she approved of because she visibly relaxed. "I'm sure you do Mr. Grissom." She turned and beckoned them to follow her. "This way please."

They stopped just inside the living room which, despite the brightness of the day, was shrouded in darkness.

"I'll just get the lights," their escort said and left them at the entryway.

"Thanks mom." The voice came disembodied from the darkened room.

As she turned on the lamps around the perimeter of the room, the woman cast worried glances at the sofa where Jonathan Morris' widow was laboriously pulling herself to her feet. As she turned and faced the CSIs a couple of things clicked into place for Sara. First of all, this was undoubtedly the woman in the pictures on the scientist's desk. Her blonde hair was pulled back into a sloppy ponytail and her face was drawn and pale, but it was definitely her. His wife then, not his daughter. For a moment, Sara felt slightly embarrassed for her immediate and inaccurate assumption. She should have known better. The second thing she noticed: Mrs. Morris was extremely pregnant. Observing the pronounced bulge around the woman's middle, she felt her eyes mist and her chest tighten. It looked as though Dr. Jonathan Morris would be leaving more behind than just his work for the world to remember him by.

"Please stay seated Mrs. Morris," Grissom urged gently. "There's no need to be formal with us."

The young woman threw him a grateful smile and sank carefully back into the cushions. "Thank you. Please call me Jenna." She rested her hands on the gentle swell of her stomach and nodded at her mother hovering in the background. "You've met my mother, Linda Foy." She turned and asked, "would you mind getting me some water, mom?"

"Oh, of course." Linda hurried out of the room.

Jenna turned sad eyes back to the investigators. "Please have a seat." She indicated a couple of chairs across the room which Grissom hastened to pull closer. "You'll have to forgive my mother. She's just trying to be protective."

"Nothing to forgive," Sara said warmly. "She's just doing her best to take care of you." She gave the woman a reassuring smile.

"Yes, she is." Jenna gave a deep sigh. "She's been staying with us for a couple of weeks to help out now that the doctor has me on bed rest." She patted her swollen abdomen. "I still have five weeks to go. Mom's been a God-send helping with Leah and now…this." Her eyes clouded.

"Leah?" Sara asked, hoping to give the distraught woman something to focus on. Sure enough her gaze softened a bit. She pointed at a framed picture sitting on the end table. Sara picked it up. It was a family portrait; Jenna and Jonathan were cuddled close together with the little girl that Sara also recognized from the office photo nestled in between them. In the photo, Jenna's gaze rested on the smiling blue-eyed girl and the doctor had eyes only for Jenna. "That was taken on Leah's second birthday last year. We spent the day at the zoo." She gave a small laugh. "I didn't even know I was pregnant yet. I thought it was all of the junk food I helped Leah eat that was making me so sick."

Sara examined the photo carefully. The age difference between Dr. Morris and his wife was clear. The silver of his hair was picked up by the sun's rays as were the wrinkles around his eyes as he smiled down on his young wife. Jenna's hair was a golden blonde and her face as smooth and fine as porcelain. What was also clear was how little a difference it made to them. They looked happy. Sara looked up and caught Grissom staring intently at the picture from over her shoulder. He had a perplexed look on his face and started slightly when he noticed Sara's eyes on him.

"She's lovely." Grissom's voice was soft as he turned his attention back to the woman on the couch.

Sara sat the photo back on the table and noticed another one next to it. "Was this your graduation?" she asked, indicating the framed picture.

"Yeah," Jenna replied, indicating that Sara could pick it up if she wanted to. "That was, oh, five years ago I guess." Linda returned just then and placed the glass of water at her daughter's elbow, touching her briefly on the head, in the way that mother's do, before leaving again.

"How long have you been married?" Sara looked at the couple in this photograph with some interest. Here, Jenna wore her cap and gown and was clearly receiving an advanced degree of some kind. A huge grin graced her face, but she wasn't smiling at the camera. Instead she was looking up at the man next to her and he was looking right back at her – Jonathan Morris.

"Since two weeks after that picture was taken." Her smile was wistful. "I had wanted to finish my doctorate before the wedding. And I did…but only just."

"How did you two know each other?" Grissom asked.

"Oh, they didn't tell you at the lab?" She gave the same sad, half smile. "I'm surprised. It's usually one of their favorite pieces of gossip. I was Jonathan's RA – his research assistant. We worked together at NorGen."

"That's where you met?"

Jenna nodded. "I was assigned to him while I was a Master's candidate. I did my dissertation with the lab and was offered a full-time position after I got my M.A. NorGen actually footed the bill for my doctoral studies."

"So, you're actually Dr. and Dr. Morris then?" Sara asked.

Jenna smiled. "Well, yes, technically, but I'm fine with Mrs. Morris. I quit the lab when Leah was born so it's kind of a moot point anyway. The other women in my 'Mommy and Me' class couldn't possibly care less if I'm a doctor or not."

"And the lab was okay with that?" Grissom asked curiously. "With you having a relationship with your superior?" Sara gave him a puzzled look.

"Were they okay with us dating?" She looked thoughtful. "Honestly, I never thought about it. It was eight years ago and people weren't as conscious about stuff like that as they are now." She gave them a wry look. "The challenge for me was getting Jonathan to go out with me, not getting the rest of the lab to approve of it. I didn't care about that."

"You did get him to go out with you eventually though," Sara commented gently.

"Yeah." Her voice was sad. "Took me long enough. I was only twenty-two and Jonathan felt he was much too old for me. There's seventeen years difference between us," she explained and then looked stricken. "Or, I guess there were." Her eyes swam with tears and she turned away to dab at them with a tissue.

"How did you finally do it then?" Sara asked when Jenna appeared more composed.

Hazel eyes met Sara's evenly. "I kissed him." Her face tightened as she fought off another wave of tears. "It was horribly, terribly unprofessional of me and it's a good thing sexual harassment wasn't as prevalent then as it is now or I would never have done it, but it worked. He was going on about how I needed to be with someone who was more my contemporary and who could treat me better than he would and I was so frustrated with him. He just couldn't see how much I wanted _him _and so I finally just went for broke and shut him up the only way I could think of."

"What happened?" Sara asked, interested despite herself.

She was rewarded with a genuine smile from the tired woman on the sofa. "He kissed me back."

At that moment, a tinny cry reached their ears and after a moment of disorientation, Sara traced the sound back to a baby monitor, half buried in the cushions of the sofa. Linda Foy scurried into the room. "Do you…"

"Bring her here, please." Jenna sat up a little further on the sofa and pushed the blankets she had been wrapped in off to the side. She gave the CSIs an apologetic look. "Sorry about that. She didn't sleep well last night. She doesn't know what's going on, but she knows something isn't right."

Sara and Grissom both murmured something reassuring as Linda reentered the room with the very unhappy little girl on her hip. Leah's blonde hair stuck out in spikes and her little face was an angry red either from sleeping or crying. Even now she looked as though she wasn't sure which of the two she wanted to be doing. She fretted and pushed away from her Grandmother as she caught sight of Jenna, leaning towards her mother with no regard for gravity. She was giving off a kind of hiccupping whimper that ceased immediately as her mother took her in her arms and settled her into what little lap she had left with cooed words and caresses. Sara noted that she brushed her hand across her daughter's brow in much the same way her own mother had just a few minutes previously and her heart clenched again.

"There now, baby. That's better isn't it?" Jenna snuggled the girl close. Leah stuck her thumb in her mouth and sucked viciously.

"I'll get her a juice," Linda offered and headed out of the room.

"We're taking up far too much of your time," Grissom began, but Jenna stopped him with a wave. "No, it's okay. Ask me whatever questions you need to. I want to do anything I can to help you find out who did this to my husband." She was all seriousness. "I'll have the rest of my life to mourn him. Now, I want to do everything I can to make sure that whoever did this gets punished."

"Do you know of anyone who could possibly have wanted to harm him?" Sara asked.

"No, not a soul. Jonathan didn't get along with everyone he worked with all the time, but most of the things that came up at work were work related. He occasionally argued with Dr. Norfield about budgetary concerns and there were a couple of lab techs that got fired a few years ago because they mishandled some lab equipment and ruined several weeks worth of data, but Jonathan was only peripherally involved in that."

Sara made a mental note to check on the firings though her instinct told her it was unrelated. She quashed the voice in her head that reminded her that just a few short hours ago she had assumed this woman was Dr. Morris' daughter.

"Can you tell us anything about Dr. Ayers?" Grissom asked.

Jenna frowned in thought. "Simon? Not especially. He and Jonathan were co-workers for years before I ever even came aboard. I know they had different priorities for the lab, but that's to be expected. You can't run a lab where no one cares about the finances and you can't run a lab where no one cares about the science. Between the two or them, their lab's bases were covered. NorGen is very successful, but it is a surprisingly cut-throat business they're in. There are so many different labs across the world working on the same type of research that at any moment another organization five thousand miles away might beat you to the punch and solidify the determining predictors for something your lab has spent six months on and then you're out. It is pretty fast-paced and _very_ expensive. Jonathan's job was the fast-pace. Simon's job was the expensive."

"Did he talk about work much at home?"

"Of course. "That's what happens when science geeks get together, we talk about science. Jonathan was very passionate about his work. He was excited about the advancements the lab was making and felt that the work they were doing was going to revolutionize preventative medicine." She toyed with a piece of frayed yarn, eyes downcast. "Jonathan's father died of Alzheimer's in his late fifties." She looked up at them with a somber expression. "Early on-set. The latest series of experiments were a kind of…" She searched for the word, "legacy, to his father." She lapsed into silence for a moment and then said quietly, "and well all thought his father died too young."

"Did he ever mention anything unusual about any of the experiments he had been working on recently?" Sara inquired.

"Not unusual per se, no. I know he seemed puzzled, but he was certainly pleased by the results they were getting with the latest runs, but aside from that…"

"Puzzled?"

She elaborated, "Well the results were much…neater, I guess than what he had expected to see." She hesitated. "I'm not sure how else to describe it. They were getting good results, but they were almost _too_ good, you know? You don't normally see that kind of consistency with these experiments. It's normal to have failures early on as you start to hone in on a pattern. That's why these cycles can run for years without any appreciable results."

"If it sounds too good to be true…" Sara began.

"It probably is." Grissom finished for her. They shared a look.

"Right," Jenna replied, "He was thrilled of course, but cautious. They took the early results to the grant review board, and of course they were just amazed at the progress NorGen was making, but when that was over, Jonathan decided to review the latest cycles himself to see if they were missing anything that might be tainting the data."

"And did he find anything?"

"Not that I know of. At least, he didn't tell me that he did and normally he would've shared something like that."

"Is there any chance he might have brought some work home with him, something related to the experiments he had been running recently?" Sara asked

"I don't think so, but it's possible. He rarely brought anything home with him from the lab, even with something as high profile as the Alzheimer's predictors. Aside from the obvious noise that comes with having a two year old in the house, he felt that it was unfair to Leah for him to be home, but inaccessible to her." She smoothed a hand over the toddler's mussed curls. The little girl had quieted and was nearly gone, sleepy eyes at half mast, still half-heartedly sucking her thumb. "She is such a daddy's girl."

Grissom stood and Sara followed suit. "Mrs. Morris, we have taken up far too much of your time today. If you wouldn't mind letting us take a look at your husband's office and work papers, we can be out of your way."

"Of course, Mr. Grissom. You're welcome to anything you find that might be of use." She craned her head over her shoulder, trying not to disturb the child in her lap. "Mom, would you mind showing them Jonathan's office?"

Linda, who had been hovering worriedly in the background through most of the interview, nodded. "Certainly." She gestured towards a different hallway than the one they had entered through. Sara and Grissom exchanged glances. He gave her a brief nod and she turned and followed their host out of the room.

He turned back to the woman on the sofa and could tell she was getting tired. The deep smudges under her eyes were pronounced and there were lines on her face that he was sure hadn't been there the day before. Tragedy is exhausting. "I appreciate you taking the time to meet with us Mrs. Morris. I know this can't have been easy for you."

"I'll do anything I can, Mr. Grissom. Thank _you_ for doing what you can to find out who did this to my husband."

"You'll get our best effort."

"I have no doubt." She sighed and laid her cheek gently on the top of the slumbering child's head, taking solace in the small, living, breathing testament to her husband's life as another grew beneath her heart.

"You know, it's funny," she said quietly several minutes later. "One of the reasons Jonathan resisted getting involved with me in the first place was because of the age difference. He was actually worried about dying before me and leaving me alone." Her quiet laugh was sardonic. "If he only knew."

She looked up at Grissom. "If he had known what was going to happen, how it was going to turn out…do you think he would have made the same choice?"

"I don't know," he replied sincerely.

"I'm angry of course." She went on, talking more to herself now than she was to him. "I'm furious that it turned out this way, but I'm still glad 'we' happened. If all we had were those five years together, well, that's five more years of happiness than a lot of people ever get…You know?"

"No," Grissom replied, utterly serious. "I don't know." He looked up as Sara reentered the room, tracking her with his eyes as she crossed the room. "But, I wish I did."

Jenna followed his gaze and then met his eyes. "You could, you know," she told him softly. "It's only too late," absently she spun the gold band on her finger around with the pad of her thumb, "when it's too late."

-------------------------------

"Did you get anything from the office?" Grissom asked after they had taken their leave of the grieving family and were on their way back to the lab.

"Hmm?" Sara was gazing out the window into the fading Nevada sun, mind a million miles away.

"Office. Evidence. Probative?" Grissom tried.

"What?" She turned away from the window. "Oh, sorry, no I was just thinking… I took his laptop and some files that he had stored there, but for the most part it looks like he really did keep his work and home life separate. Most of the paperwork I found was bills and taxes and stuff. Not much related to the lab at all. I'm still going to have our guys take a look at the computer and see if there are any files or emails that might shed some light. So far I'm just not seeing anything that would make someone want to kill this guy."

"A lot of people don't need much motivation."

"True," Sara agreed, "but this still seems to have been very specific. It doesn't look like random violence. Someone made it a point to find this guy alone at his work, after hours. Really makes me think we're looking at someone else who works at the lab." She shrugged. "I'll go through all the stuff I collected at the house, but like I said, I didn't really see anything out of the ordinary. Apparently what happens at the lab, stays at the lab."

"Interesting that a guy that was so into his work would have so little evidence of it in his home," Grissom mused thoughtfully.

"Maybe he just had higher priorities than his job," Sara replied, eyes back on the landscape.

Not at all sure how to reply, Grissom merely kept his attention on the road and let the conversation lapse into silence for the remainder of the ride.

A million different thoughts were whirling around inside the supervisor's brain as he drove. He wanted so much to dwell on the things he had learned about the relationship between Jenna and Jonathan Morris, but in all good conscious he couldn't allow himself to focus on the aspects of the case that he took a personal interest in. It was more important right now that he concentrate on the points that were salient to their investigation. He began making a mental checklist of avenues that would require further inspection. Through it all though he found that he was uncomfortably hyper-aware of the woman at his side.

They got back to the lab in good time, just beating the evening rush of commuters as they headed home from work. Vegas was definitely a 24-hour town, but even it had a rush hour to contend with – made all the worse by the flocks of tourists who ventured out around the same time as the commuters to take advantage of the early-bird dinner specials available at most any restaurant near the strip.

"Do you want to grab some dinner?" Grissom asked as they crossed the parking lot, laden with the items taken from the Morris home. "We could order in while we go over all of this stuff." He wasn't sure what prompted him to ask. They rarely took a traditional meal break on the night shift simply because it wasn't a traditional kind of job. Odds were largely against any of the team knowing where they were going to be when lunch time rolled around – lunch time being defined loosely as the meal eaten halfway thorough the day – so it was much more likely that the CSIs would catch as catch can during the shift and plan for something more substantial at the end of the work day when they would often get together and go out for a meal.

If Sara thought the question was out of the ordinary, she didn't show it. "Sure. Sounds good. I need to drop this stuff off in evidence and get a copy of the keycard log onto Archie's desk before he comes in so he can start matching it to the surveillance tapes. How about I take care of that and you…order a pizza?"

Grissom nodded. "Pizza's good. Vegetarian from Papa Gino's?"

"Why?" Sara asked, with an amused expression on her face. "You thinking of going veggie?"

Grissom looked confused. "Going veggie?"

Sara resisted the urge to roll her eyes. "Vegetarian? No longer eating meat?"

"Oh. Oh, no. I mean, I still eat meat. I just thought you might not like to have it on the pizza…" He trailed off.

Sara took pity on him and laughed. "It's _okay_ Griss. I'm certainly not going to eat any of it, but I don't mind if _you_ do. Get half and half. Let your carnivore flag fly. I'll meet you in the break room in fifteen." She started to walk away and then hesitated and turned back, her eyes not quite meeting his as she spoke, "uh, thanks for thinking of something like that though. I uh, really appreciate that you remembered." She met his gaze for a second and flashed a quick smile, giving him the briefest glimpse of the small gap between her front teeth and then she was gone down the hall.

Grissom felt absurdly pleased by her acknowledgment and fought to keep a smile from lingering on his face as he walked to his office to call in their dinner order. It was unheard of for Sara and him to share a meal together without benefit of at least some of the others from the team and in the last twenty-four hours they had done it twice. He tried not to analyze his motives too carefully, afraid that if he did he would find the selfish desire to simply spend time with her at their core.

He was treated to several minutes of elevator quality muzak while he waited for someone at Papa Gino's to pick up the phone. He placed the order – getting a half veggie, half pepperoni pie and then settling in the break room to go over his notes while he waited for Sara to come back from evidence. A few minutes later she slid into the chair across from him, a sheaf of papers in hand. She flashed him a quick smile and bent to her work. They worked in companionable silence until the pizza arrived and then set everything aside to discuss the case as they ate.

"Did Brass have any luck tracking down the elusive Dr. Ayers?" Sara asked as she helped herself to a still steaming slice.

"We've got his address. Brass called and stopped by, but wherever our missing doctor is, it isn't at home. Human resources at NorGen verified that he was in Reno for a conference, but that he should be back in the office tomorrow. We'll drop by then."

Sara nodded through a mouthful of cheese. They had both come in early and could justifiably leave after putting in a standard shift, but neither of them bothered pretending that they weren't going to work straight through to the next shift. Evidence gathering was slow going and the longer it took, the less likely it was that this case would ever be resolved. Though neither of them mentioned it, both were mindful of the little girl and the unborn baby who would do their growing up without a father. For them, if for no one else, they needed to find out who had done this.

"Where do we stand on our hair from the crime scene?"

"Still waiting on Hodges for that one," Sara replied. "He swears he'll have it for me tonight. I had him run it directly against Deena Michael's sample since she fit the visual. If it was hers then we should know it by the beginning of shift. He was just waiting for DNA replication to be sufficient to determine a match."

"Okay, fine. Let me know when you hear back. Archie has the surveillance videos?"

Sara nodded. "I gave him a copy of the manifest too. Hopefully he'll be able to match the keycards swipes with the video footage."

"Good. While you go through the files from the Morris' home, I'm going to have Warrick look into the lab techs that were fired from the lab a couple of years ago."

Sara raised an eyebrow. "And you will be…"

"Here. Going through Dr. Morris' files." He cocked his head to the side and smiled. "With you."

**A/N:** Once again, a million thank-yous to Foxtoast and Rhee - my inimitable betas


	5. Chapter 5

**Disclaimer:** Wish I owned them...still don't.

**Breaking Stasis**

By Tallulah

**Chapter 5**

"There was pizza? Why did no one tell me there was pizza?"

"Hi, Greg," Grissom and Sara intoned simultaneously without looking up from their work.

"I can't believe you guys ordered in and didn't tell me." He flipped the top off of the left-over pizza box and was temporarily pleased to see several slices remaining, only to discover they were stone cold. "Good gravy, how early did you guys come in tonight? This stuff is practically petrified." He thumped a slice against the box in disgust, then bit into it anyway. "Veggie?" he said, giving Sara a dark look. "You let me eat vegetarian pizza? That is such a crime." He slouched back into a chair and proceeded to demolish the two remaining slices. Sara and Grissom exchanged a look and went back to ignoring him.

"So what's on tap tonight?" Greg asked after a few moments of blissful quiet.

Grissom glanced up at the clock. "Your guess is as good as mine, Greg." He pushed away from the table. "I haven't checked assignments yet."

"No need, boss." Warrick entered the room and handed a small stack of paper slips to Grissom. I passed Ecklie on my way in." He made a face.

"Where's Nicky?" Sara asked.

Grissom looked up from the messages in his hand. "His B&E in Fairdale turned into a prostitution ring bust. He's down at PD with ladies and their, ah…manager." He looked back down. "You'd think these people would learn not to call the cops out to their place of business…at least when it's an illegal place of business."

"Stupid is as stupid does." Greg said wisely. Grissom's looked at him quizzically. "Forrest Gump," the younger man went on, citing his source. Sara and Warrick rolled their eyes in unison; Grissom's puzzled look didn't change. "What?" Greg said, "I can't quote too?"

"Do you have somewhere to be, Greg?" Grissom asked.

"Well, if you don't have anything for me then I have about a million pieces of trash evidence to sort through on my drug distributor." He leaned across the table towards Sara, "Did you know that drug dealers tend not to recycle?" She gave him a blank look.

"Happy hunting, Greggo," Grissom said cheerily and glanced meaningfully at the door.

The young CSI groaned and dragged himself out of his chair. "Well, one man's trash is another man's evidence." He pulled a plastic clip out of his pocket and clipped it over his nose. "Wish me luck," he said, the clip distorting his voice, and marched out of the room.

"He's a trooper," Sara said with a grin.

"Yeah, remind me to give him a medal." Grissom looked at Warrick over the top of his glasses. "What do you have going on tonight, Rick?

"I got court in the morning so I'm going over case notes, but I don't have anything else pending right now. Y'all need a hand with your dead doctor?"

Grissom nodded and handed a copy of Brasses notes to him. "There are the names of two people who were fired from NorGen Labs two years ago. Dr. Morris was involved in the firing. It's a long shot, but we just want to make sure these guys aren't involved. Seems unlikely, but you never know. If you can get an alibi for them, we can count them out as suspects. We're short on those and motives right now."

"You got it." Warrick took the notes and left to make the calls.

Grissom turned his attention to Sara. "See anything interesting?" She tilted her head to the side with a smile and quirked an amused eyebrow at him. He elaborated, feeling inexplicably warm, "In the data. Do you see anything interesting in the data?"

She looked down at the pages spread in front of her. "I see what Dr. Morris meant when he talked about these results being too neat. This is what you see after years of narrowing your search, not months." She sat back in her chair, her brow furrowed in thought. "No wonder he was so thrilled. This type of research should span an entire career, not be something you bang out in a couple of months." She chewed on her lip thoughtfully for a few moments. "Did you ever see the movie Office Space?" She asked.

Grissom gave her a confused look. "Have we started a new conversation or is this related to the case somehow?"

Sara rolled her eyes. "_Yes_, Griss, it relates to the case."

"I'm very interested in seeing where you're going with this. No, I haven't seen it."

She leaned forward and clasped her hands together. "Okay, in a nutshell, it's about a couple of programmer's who write a program, kind of like a virus, that gets buried in some financial software. The idea is that anytime a transaction occurs that involves fractions of a cent, their program shaves off the fractions and puts it into an account that they have set up. They figure that with enough transactions over a long enough period of time, they'll have a decent sum set aside and it'll be such small amounts, no-one will ever notice. Does that make sense?"

Grissom obviously looked as though he wanted to say 'no', but instead said, "I think you watch too many movies, but yes, I'm with you so far. How does this relate?"

"I'm getting to that." Sara waved him off impatiently. "The point is, it didn't work, or rather it _did_ work, but better than they thought it would…people noticed."

He pursed his lips and crossed his arms. "Go on."

Getting into her groove, Sara continued, "Okay, what if we had someone at NorGen who was desperate to keep the grant money coming in, but didn't think they had the results they thought they'd need to keep the feds interested? This is a cut-throat business like Jenna was saying, right? At any minute another lab somewhere else in the world could announce findings that would make NorGens' contributions obsolete and there goes all of their hard work and possibly their funding."

Grissom nodded, interested. "Morris wouldn't appreciate anyone manipulating his results, especially not when you consider how much the Alzheimer's predictors meant to him personally."

"Right, I don't think he'd tolerate it for a second. She went on, holding up the neat print outs of data. "I think somebody messed with Dr. Morris's data somehow so that when it was taken before the grant review board, they couldn't help but award the extension. With demonstrable results, it would have looked like the genetic predictors for Alzheimer's were right around the corner for NorGen. The only problem was…"

"They did too good of a job." Grissom supplied, fascinated.

"Exactly." Sara laid several sheets of graph paper on top of each other and held them up to the fluorescent lights so the ink showed through. The graphs on each page were nearly identical. "I think whoever did this meant for the correlations to appear, but only just barely. Maybe they meant for them to grow stronger over time, but they did something wrong. It happened much too fast."

"How would someone go about sabotaging the data like that?"

Sara shrugged. "That I don't know. There are a couple of places in the process where it would be possible, though I can't imagine anyone would have access to the data before Dr. Morris vetted it himself." She narrowed her gaze thoughtfully. "Logistically, Deena might have had the opportunity, but I just don't see the motive. She's only a research assistant. Her career doesn't depend on NorGen's success. My guess is that whatever software the lab uses for compiling these results has been tampered with, but that's just a guess."

Grissom shook his head. "No, that's a theory." He met her eyes across the table. "We're going to have to have diagnostics take a closer look at Dr. Morris' computer, and we're going to have to go back to NorGen."

A tapping on the glass wall of the breakroom brought their attention around to Archie. He swung into the room on one hand, leaning in the doorway. "You guys are gonna want to see this."

They followed the tech back to the A/V room where he had the surveillance footage from the NorGen security cameras cued up. Archie settled in behind his impressive display of state-of-the-art equipment and swiveled in his chair to face the two CSIs.

"I've been running over the footage from the security cameras at NorGen and comparing each entry that day with the names logged on the card scan manifest." He held up the stapled list, now highlighted and notated. "Now, I did find a handful of instances where more than one person entered the building on a single card swipe; people holding the door for each other – that type of thing, but on continuing review of the tapes, all of those people also exited the building before the murder took place.

"So our murderer had to swipe a badge to get into the building." Grissom offered.

"Well, yes," Archie replied, "but don't get too excited." He flipped a couple of pages over into the manifest and pointed to an entry. "10:16 – Richard Greenway scans his own badge to enter the building."

Turning back to the still screen on the monitor, Archie moved forward a few frames, the time stamp in the lower corner counting up in slow motion. As the seconds ticked leisurely by, a figure entered the cameras view from the right and proceeded up the steps to the card reader by the side door. Richard Greenway was easily recognizable even in the dim lighting, but a brief turn of the head brought his face into clear view and verified it.

"Yeah, that's Greenway alright." Sara's tone made it clear that her opinion of the man hadn't mellowed in the intervening hours since their interview. Grissom smiled to himself.

"Okay, so Greenway enters at 10:16." Archie allowed the recording to move forward at regular speed until Greenway's silent form had disappeared into the building and out of the cameras range. He paused the video again and spun his chair to face a second monitor which was cued to a shot from the same camera. The only difference between the two images on the screens was the small green numbers glowing in the bottom corner of each shot. "At 10:43, we see Greenway exit the lab from the same entrance he entered." The A/V tech advanced the video until the subject moved back into sight, pushing through the inner door and back out into the night. He glanced up at Grissom and Sara who watched the flickering images without comment. "I checked with computer diagnostics and they confirm Greenway's story. The time stamp on the system login and keystrokes shows that he was in the computer room from 10:18 to 10:40.

"We pretty much knew all of this Archie, though this does back up what Greenway told us so technically it does give him an alibi," Grissom said. "What is it that you wanted to show us?'

"I'm getting to it," Archie replied. "Trust me, it's relevant." He handed the manifest to Sara. "Look at the card swipes after 10:00 p.m. Does anything jump out at you?"

Frowning in concentration, Sara looked over the neat columns of information. "No, I don't see any…oh, wait." She looked up at Grissom in surprise. "Richard Greenway logged into the building at 10:16 and _again_ at 10:25."

"Right," Archie said. "Only it wasn't Richard Greenway. Look." Turning back to the first monitor, the time stamp reading 10:17 – just after Greenway's disappearance in the building, Archie scanned forward until the numbers rolled over to 10:24. "Here's our mystery player." He hit play and sat back in his chair with his arms crossed. Within a minute, a dark figure moved into the camera's focus and walked up the steps to the card reader. The identity of the person would be impossible to make out. Aware of the camera's presence, they kept their face turned away and a baseball cap pulled low over their forehead. Attired in a windbreaker and tan pants, it was impossible to tell much from physical makeup alone.

"Odds on, that's our guy." Sara squinted a little closer to the screen. "Or girl."

"It seems likely," Archie said, "but you guys are the experts. I just push the buttons." He sped the tape forward to 10:51 and the same figure reappeared in the doorway, hurrying, but still making a conscious effort to avert his or her face away from the camera's eye.

"Okay, so our possible murderer entered the building at 10:25 and didn't exit again until 10:51." Sara looked at Grissom. "Twenty-six minutes is more than enough time for the perp to enter the building, get into Dr. Norfield's office and get the gun from the cabinet, go up to the third floor, kill Dr. Morris, return the gun and then get caught on tape making an exit.

Grissom nodded. "It's certainly a reasonable time frame."

"Do you think the murderer knew that Greenway would be coming back that night?" Archie asked.

"Not necessarily," Grissom replied. "In fact, it's likely that our perp assumed he wouldn't be. It would have been a safe bet if it weren't for the hardware problems Greenway told us about. It would look perfectly normal for Greenway to log into the building so late. If he hadn't actually had to go back in that evening, we might never have realized it wasn't him." He pursed his lips in thought for a moment. "Thanks Archie," he said finally and then to Sara, "Let's get diagnostics on the computer from Dr. Morris' office. We'll go to NorGen first thing in the morning and have a talk with Richard Greenway about how someone else got a hold of a copy of his id badge. We may luck out and get a chance to speak to the elusive Dr. Ayers as well."

Grissom and Sara exited the A/V lab and headed back to the break room. On their way down the hall, David Hodges, the trace lab technician spotted them and veered in their direction. Sara pretended not to see him as he strode toward them and quickly sidestepped into the ladies room. She could do without Hodges preening for one night. Besides which it was Grissom that the oily tech most wished to impress, and thus suck up to.

"Hey boss."

Grissom steeled himself for the encounter with his least favorite team member. He dearly wished that Hodges wasn't as good at his job as he was. At least then he would have a legitimate reason to dislike him. He took a deep breath. "Hello, David."

"And how are you this evening?" Hodges asked. He leaned against the wall with his arms crossed and an inquisitive look on his face.

"I'm fine. Do you have results for me?" Grissom hated to be short, but…well actually he didn't.

Hodges looked disappointed. "Well, yes. Yes, I do. I got the results back on your LBH, that's a 'long brown hair', from the lab shooting."

"What do you call it if the hair is blonde?" Grissom asked.

"What?"

Resisting the urge to roll his eyes, Grissom gestured for the man to continue. "Never mind, what did you find?"

"Well, just so you know, the hair tag was only a partial and what we did have was deteriorated – probably from overuse of chemical products – so it took some extra time and a good bit of extra effort on my part to get the sample extracted for replication…"

Grissom cut him off. "I'm sure it was a lot of hard work. Now, can you please just tell me if you got a match?"

Totally unperturbed at having his self-promoting diatribe cut short, Hodges immediately switched gears. "You were right of course. The hair belonged to Deena Michaels, The doctor's research assistant.

Grissom nodded. "That's what we expected. It doesn't eliminate her as a suspect, but at least it doesn't add anyone else to the pool. Thanks, David."

Hodges visibly preened. Grissom resisted the urge to roll his eyes again. "Goodbye, David," he said and continued on his way down the hall.

"Do you want the report?" Hodges called after him.

"Just leave it on my desk," Grissom replied over his shoulder, without breaking stride.

Sara joined him a few minutes later in the break room.

"Chicken," he said with a wry look.

She looked surprised for a moment and then smiled. "Yes, well I didn't want to risk getting caught between the ass kiss-_er_ and the ass kiss-_ee_. I thought it would be safer for me to keep my distance."

"Hmm," Grissom replied, but smiled as they both went back to their work.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

A few hours later, the sun slowly began to make its way through the Nevada sky and the never-sleeping town of Las Vegas began the official part of its day. The traffic flow on the strip slowed to a trickle – though it never actually stopped no matter what the time of the day – and the commuters on their way into the business parks began to clog traffic on the other side of town.

Sara and Grissom had spent the evening compiling data and contrasting results from the reams of printouts they had taken from the lab and from Dr. Morris' office. Nothing else of great interest had presented itself, but the correlations that had so enraptured and puzzled Dr. Morris were becoming much more evident.

Sara sat back in her chair and indulged in a spine-cracking stretch. "I need coffee. Want some?"

Grissom nodded and gave a monosyllabic grunt that more or less conveyed acceptance, but did not look up from his work.

She ambled over to the coffee pot and fiddled with the ancient contraption until it started percolating and producing something that looked at least somewhat like coffee. Leaning against the counter as she waited for the pot to finish, Sara was annoyed to discover that at some point in the last few hours, her backside had gone numb. After checking to be sure that she was standing out of Grissom's peripheral vision, she rubbed the offending area surreptitiously, trying to get the blood flow going again. Back in San Francisco, in her early days as a young and eager CSI level 1, she would never have guessed that this job could entail so much _sitting_.

As the coffee's aroma began to permeate the room, Warrick came ambling in. He took a deep breath. "Ah, glorious caffeine – fodder of the gods." He dropped into Sara's vacated chair and glanced over the stacks of printouts spread across the table. "Hey, this looks like fun."

"Oh, it is. Feel free to pitch in. We could use an extra set of eyes."

Warrick raised his hands in surrender. "You got me. I'd rather go help Greg sort through Mt. Trashmore out in the garage."

"Wuss." Sara smirked at her co-worker and plunked a coffee cup down in front of him. As soon as the pot gurgled to a finish, she brought it over and filled Warrick's mug, re-filling Grissom's at the same time. She poured another one for herself and took the seat next to her boss, who had still as of yet failed to acknowledge either of them. After a moment, he reached out blindly for his cup, still too intent on his reading to look up long enough to locate it. Sara gave Warrick a wry glance and pushed the elusive mug into Grissom's questing fingers.

"What do you think? Should we carry on without him?" Warrick asked. "It looks like he might be a while."

Sara peeked over Grissom's shoulder. "Nah, he's only got a couple of paragraphs left. Let's let him finish."

They sat in amused silence for a few more minutes until Grissom finally lowered the pages. He took off his glasses and gave each of them a dirty look. "You know, just because I don't acknowledge you, doesn't mean I can't hear you."

"Duly noted boss." Warrick grinned and handed him a thin folder. "I've been on the phone all night tracking down your former NorGen lab rats." Grissom opened the file as Warrick explained the contents. "Robert Culver and Thomas Sizeman were both let go at the same time for 'inappropriate conduct' according to the official reports from NorGen's HR department, but it really just boiled down to two idiots horsing around in one of the labs during a late shift. Apparently they were playing round and inadvertently turned on some heating equipment. The problem didn't get caught in time and all of the specimens being stored that lab were destroyed. They did get fired for it, but it doesn't look like there was any real heat behind it on either side. Nonetheless, just 'cause I'm so thorough, I tracked your boys down. Culver currently works for a small lab in upstate New Jersey that does blood analysis. I spoke to him briefly and he can account for his whereabouts the day of the murder. He was at work. I checked with his supervisor and he backs the story. Sizeman was harder to track down, but easier to eliminate. He's been in Wichita Falls Hospital for the last six days after side-swiping a deer with his motorcycle. I'm thinking he's not your guy." At the end of his re-cap, Warrick settled back in his chair and wrapped his long fingers around the warm mug. "Oh, and for the record, neither of _them_ could figure out why anyone would want to kill Dr. Morris either. They both said they liked the guy."

"Well, at least that's two out of our cast of dozens eliminated," Sara said and slumped back in her chair. "How many more are there? This could take weeks."

"Eliminate all of the impossibilities and what you're left with are possibilities," Grissom said. "Thanks, Warrick."

"Sure thing. He nodded. "Oh, I've got the results on your murder weapon too." Warrick produced another folder and handed this one to Sara. "You can thank me for running interference with Hodges later. I'll let you buy me breakfast."

She laughed. "Small price to pay for such a large favor. Deal." She was quiet for a moment as she read over the evidentiary report and then looked up, addressing Grissom. "Not much help, I'm afraid. There were no prints on the weapon, I knew that, but trace came back with very little either. The only substances they identified were gun oil, talc and good old fashioned dust. Dr. Norfield should consider cleaning his piece more often. All that dirt's rough on the firing pin. The talc was a match to the brand of latex glove that the lab uses, but wasn't found in a significant enough quantity to say for sure that the shooter was actually wearing the gloves. It could have easily been transfer picked up from trace amounts in the drawer where Dr. Norfield had it stored."

Grissom nodded. It wasn't a lot, but so much of this process involved eliminating unrelated information and finding context for the relevant facts that any steps at all were steps in the right direction.

Sara closed the file and stood. "I'm going to go down to diagnostics and see if they've gotten anywhere on Morris' lab computer. I had them prioritize that over his home laptop since that's the computer he would've using to run the data for the cycles. Maybe they can find something that will support my 'Office Space' theory." She rinsed her mug and added it to the dishwasher before leaving the break room.

Warrick looked puzzled. "Office Space? What has that got to do with anything?"

Grissom was pleased to know that he wasn't the only one out of fashion with the current trends in entertainment. "I wondered the same thing."

"Isn't that the movie with that Milton guy and the Swingline Stapler?"

The CSI supervisor gave him a dry look. "You guys all have way too much free time on your hands."

--------------------------------------------------------------

"Hey, Scott," Sara called as she pulled open the door to the computer diagnostics lab.

There was no immediate response. After a moment of silence, dulled only slightly by the steady hum emanating from the dozen or so PCs and laptops scattered around the room, a voice said, "Dammit!"

"Scott?" She called again, peering around the room for the County's best computer expert. Shelves of computer equipment in every shape, size and possible function lined each side of the room. There was no sign of Scott.

"Oh, for God's sake. What the hell was that?"

Sara followed the staccato sound of rapid-fire typing through to the back of the stacks until she found Scott Bradford, MIT graduate and computer expert extraordinaire, typing furiously at a workstation in the back corner of the room.

"Son of a…Oh, come on you bastard!"

Sara could see why he hadn't responded. He hadn't heard her. A pair of headphones covered the computer techs ears. He was bent over the keyboard, typing at breakneck speed, but his eyes never left the screen. She reached out and tapped him on the shoulder.

Scott exploded out of the chair as though he had been shot.

"Oh, good _God_, Sara!" He leaned against the desk, breathing heavily. His blue eyes were wide behind his glasses and his hair stuck out where the headphones had been ripped off his head during his ascent. "Don't _do_ that!"

"Sorry. Sounds like whatever you're working on isn't cooperating. Big project?"

"What? Oh, right…big project…not cooperating." He looked nervous and wouldn't meet her eyes. She noticed that even in his surprise, he was careful to keep his body between her and the monitor.

"Scott…"

"Uh, what?" His fair skin flushed under her scrutiny.

"What exactly _are_ you doing in here?"

He opened his mouth to reply and then closed it again. The young man's shoulders slumped. "Don't tell Grissom…please?" He moved away from the screen.

"_Video_ games?" Sara exclaimed in disbelief. She looked at him incredulously. "You're playing video games. You have got to be kidding me".

He shrugged uncomfortably and gave her a weak smile. "It's multi-player Quake. A bunch of the guys from other labs all log on at the same time and we play teams…"

Sara stopped him, angrily. "I don't care what you're playing Scott. I care that I have two computers here that need your attention, that are part of a _murder_ investigation, need I remind you, and you're back here _playing_…"

The guilty look was quickly replaced by a panicked one. "No, no no!" He waved his hands back and forth. "No, I'm done with those. I even have the report for you." He grabbed a folder from his desk and thrust it into her hands. "It's all there, everything from the computer at the lab and the laptop from the home. I went over them both with a fine-toothed comb. I was able to recover some deleted emails from both of them, but nothing seemed relevant." He gestured at the hefty file. "I printed everything out for you of course, so you can see for yourself, but there was no 'get murdered today' appointment in his calendar…" He chuckled nervously, but Sara's expression didn't change so he continued. 'I looked into every crevice of the software package that the doctor used for compiling his results…" He trailed off, looking apologetic. "There's nothing there, Sara. This instance of the software tool is straight out of the box. The only customization that has been done at all is to register Dr. Morris as the primary user and that happens when the installation is done."

"Damn." Sara pressed her lips together. "I really thought I was on to something…" She opened the file and looked it over with a sigh.

"Well, I don't know if it makes you feel better, but what you were thinking_ is_ actually possible with this software."

"What do you mean?"

"Well, you don't exactly buy this kind of product at Office Depot. It's very specialized and written for specific applications, but there is room left for individual customization by the end user."

"What kind of customization are we talking about?"

Scott shrugged. "It depends on the user, but the way it is written, there are…'holes' left in the code that anyone who knows the programming language can activate and fill. This reroutes the logic outside of the standard code and allows the end user to manipulate the data with his…," he darted a quick look in Sara's direction, "or _her_ own calculations. It's a user exit."

"But you didn't find anything like that anywhere on this computer did you?"

He shook his head ruefully. "Nope, sorry. Wish I could say I had, but the exits on this baby have never been accessed, much less activated."

Sara chewed on her lip for a moment. "Thanks, Scott," she said distractedly as she turned towards the door.

"Uh, Sarah…"

"Yeah?" She turned back, curiously.

Scott shifted from foot to foot and nodded at the monitor which was still showing scenes from the video game. Occasionally, a computer-animated creature of some kind would amble onto the screen in hot pursuit of a camouflage clad, bazooka bearing, computer-animated soldier. "Are you going to ah…tell Grissom about…"

She pantomimed locking her lips and throwing away the key. Scott drooped in relief.

"You might want to consider turning the volume down a little though," she suggested, laughing at his rueful grin. Waving at the tech over her shoulder, she headed back to the break room to catch Grissom up on what she had learned.

**A/N:** RL has been keeping me uber-busy so many apologies for the delay in getting this updated. My thanks once again to Foxtoast

Oh, and can I get an amen that our favorite geeks are together _in canon_? My cup runneth over...


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